Shortly after embattled morning show cohost Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) has publicly announced her new on-air partner (Reese Witherspoon)—in an act of defiance that leaves her corporate bosses enraged—network president Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) is already in spin mode.
“Alex Levy, her sell-by date, it expired years ago,” Cory tells his morally bankrupt boss while trying to spin Alex’s sucker-punch as a positive. “She needed to go. Everybody knew we were going to fire her. But Mitch”—the disgraced former host played by Steve Carell—“fucked that up by fucking everything. So now everybody is curious: What are we going to do? So what we’re going to do is give her this victory—a pyrrhic victory, make her think that she’s won. But really we’re going to let this nobody in to freshen the show, juice ratings for sweeps, and finally push Alex Levy off the show for good when it is convenient for us, and when we don’t have to look like the bad guys.”
His boss, Fred Micklin (Tom Irwin), isn’t convinced. But Cory continues undaunted. “Watching a beloved woman’s breakdown is timeless American entertainment,” he adds.
As Fred closes the elevator doors on his subordinate, Cory concludes their contentious conversation with what might be his official mantra. “Chaos, it’s the new cocaine,” he blurts out, all but exploding with excitement.
The scene, a marquee moment near the beginning of episode three of The Morning Show, is a pivot point for Cory, setting him up as a ruthless operator who not only sees three chess moves ahead but maybe also built the board in the first place.
“Cory’s main intellectual virtue is his capacity to process a lot of social information very quickly,” Crudup told Vanity Fair in a recent phone conversation. “He thinks faster than I do, he speaks faster than I do, and that to me seemed, on the page, very clear. I kept looking at some of these monologues thinking, who the fuck talks like that? Who thinks it’s okay to take that much space in a conversation for some absolute insane idea? What kind of person has that level of self-possession without any of the self-consciousness, and can live or die with the results?”
The splashiest of Apple TV+’s inaugural series, The Morning Show initially weathered some mixed reviews. But critics and viewers who invested in the full season were rewarded with a highly entertaining drama that married weighty material—like the messy aftermath of the #MeToo movement—with punchy, Aaron Sorkin-adjacent righteous monologues. No performance embodied the show’s dual poles better than Crudup, who even in negative reviews was singled out as a high point.
Awards voters have noticed as well. Crudup won best supporting actor at the Critics Choice Awards, and followed that honor up with a nomination from the Screen Actors Guild. Last month, Crudup landed his first-ever Emmy nomination, one of eight the show received overall (including nods for Aniston, Carell, Crudup’s fellow supporting actor nominee Mark Duplass, and guest actor Martin Short).
“One of the good things about getting older is you’ve seen a lot of the highs and lows,” Crudup said of the overall response to season one. “I keep my ambitions high and my expectations low, and the actual work that we did was so fulfilling and rewarding that I didn’t have expectations really beyond that. I was thrilled that people responded to [the show] the way they did, because I do feel like the story is attempting to do something that feels like a necessity.”