The Morning Show (currently airing its third season on AppleTV+) might be the weirdest series on television. It’s an expensive, high-gloss show with two mega-stars as its leads—Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston—that has, since its beginning, seemed almost reverse engineered, as if Apple got Witherspoon and Aniston on board with a vague pitch and only then started figuring out the show that would surround them. The Morning Show is both topical and completely untethered from the real world, a workplace drama in which fantasy reigns. 

The series’ second season was one of its medium’s great oddities—an erratic, shouty mishmash of salient headline ripping and soapy intrigue, at once sincere and totally bonkers. The third season, which premiered last month, continues in that tradition: in the premiere episode, Witherspoon’s character, overnight TV news star Bradley Jackson, goes to space. 

But perhaps the strangest thing about season three is how deliberately confusing it is. The audience is plopped back into the show in medias res: at some point in time between last season and this one, Bradley was promoted to evening news anchor, had some sort of romantic falling out with colleague Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies), and became a party to a mysterious secret worriedly whispered about in an episode in which the whole of UBA, the media conglomerate where we lay our scene, has been hacked. Watching those first few episodes, I found myself wondering how I possibly could have forgotten so much of season two; surely I was missing something.

It turns out that, no, The Morning Show is disorienting on purpose. The writers made the risky storytelling choice to withhold crucial information until the season’s fifth episode, “Love Island,” which dropped on Apple TV+ on October 4. The episode whisks us back in time to explain everything we were confused about, forcing us to relive the pandemic (in sped-up form) in the process. The conceit is pointless on some fronts—we didn’t really need, say, the origin story of the courtship of billionaire Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), an Elon Musk-esque titan of industry, and UBA CEO Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup), who is looking to sell the company. But in at least one key way, the flashback episode pays off handsomely. 

Despite Witherspoon’s considerable star power, Bradley has long been one of the weakest characters on The Morning Show. She’s supposedly there to question the status quo of television news, to demand, in Appalachian populist fashion, that truly important, often overlooked stories get covered. But that’s not really the job of a network morning show host, whose mandate is to be perky and telegenic and nimble with a teleprompter read. In season three, Bradley has finally gotten what she’s long wanted and been placed in a more serious role, where the teleprompter must be read far more gravely. But she realized that dream through sordid means. 

The fifth episode traces Bradley during the pandemic: quarantining in Montana with Laura, learning about the death of her mother, breaking up with Laura in a well-acted argument scene, and then traveling to Washington D.C., where Bradley finds herself inside the Capitol during the insurrection. Don’t waste time questioning whether any network brass would have allowed, say, Peter Jennings or Katie Couric to go, alone, to such a happening. Just accept the show’s insistence that Bradley is a brave maverick, determined to get the story no matter the danger. 

She is not without her ethical faults, though. In the course of the insurrection, Bradley sees her troubled brother, Hal (Joe Tippet), assaulting a police officer. She films it with her phone, but later deletes that section of the footage to protect her brother. The footage that she does show her bosses is so impressive, so newsworthy that she leverages it to secure the nightly anchor job. She ropes Cory into the lie, and thus the tension is set for the rest of the season. 

It’s a pretty juicy dilemma for an otherwise dull character, one that does, in broad and melodramatic fashion, address the seedy compromises no doubt made by powerful media figures in our real world. Perhaps a more realistic version of this morality tale would have Bradley erasing footage that someone else shot—because, again, would a celebrity morning news anchor really be on the ground themselves?—but The Morning Show is not terribly interested in realism. 

Or is it? It’s incredibly difficult to get a read on the show’s conception of itself: whether the people behind The Morning Show are trying to make soapy nonsense or if they are operating on the belief that this is heavy, important stuff. 

Ultimately, the series runs into the same problem as did the show it is (accidentally or not) emulating, Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. Both series need to at least try to convince the audience that television news is the world’s most vital source of information, be it cable or broadcast—a premise that’s just not credible in a time of such media dispersion. Long, long gone are the days when the nightly news was the vessel through which most Americans learned about the world. But The Morning Show desperately wants us to feel that sense of august, monoculture meaning.

Yet plenty else in the season suggests an awareness of traditional media’s fading empire, as evidenced by UBA’s considerable financial woes. (Though, in this kooky universe, their streaming service is a hit.) Just when the viewer starts to think The Morning Show is hopelessly earnest, it says something wry about the state of things, muddying any easy read of the series. The show is forever mutating, seemingly always in search of its proper shape. This season’s billionaire plotline puts the show in the uneasy company of Succession—because that’s a series that worked, so why shouldn’t The Morning Show try to do that too? 

What I’m saying here, I guess, is that The Morning Show remains one of the most bizarrely interesting programs on TV, a tonal mess that is nonetheless richly entertaining. (And, apart from Bradley’s ’90s-sitcom-set apartment, one that offers lots of satisfying lifestyle porn.) This week’s episode pushes the season down an intriguing path, one that can’t possibly lead anywhere good for Bradley, Cory, or her brother. I am eager to see how The Morning Show unties this particular knot, and to see what other forms it attempts to mimic. And it’s not too late for you, dear reader, to catch up and go on that peculiar journey with me.