The Morning Show is full of fascinating characters played by seasoned actors, but Billy Crudup’s Cory Ellison may be the best among them. The character himself is not particularly new or intriguing: Ellison is the freshly appointed head of the news and entertainment division, and his unconventional ideas rattle the chains of the show’s veterans. What sets this iteration of the stereotype apart are the choices Crudup makes with the character when bringing Ellison from script to screen.
Season 1 is set in the aftermath of a #MeToo scandal involving The Morning Show’s male co-anchor. The fallout creates panic in every direction, with everyone from the show’s assistants to the network executives worried they will lose their jobs because of Mitch’s (Steve Carell) indiscretions. Everyone's energy suddenly goes to playing it safe and they begin reining in anything that might seem controversial.
Ellison, on the other hand, seems to see the whole event as a grand opportunity. He is like the Joker with a bag full of bombs, seemingly looking for any opportunity to blow something up, and his ideas work. This breeds insecurity in the rest of the cast and the viewers, leaving everyone to wonder if their interpretation of unfolding events is accurate. It also gives Ellison’s reactions an air of precognition that is intensely interesting. What makes Cory Ellison the best part of The Morning Show is that, in an environment where everyone is terrified, Crudup has made Cory Ellison fearless, and while it's not always irable, it's certainly fascinating.
Ellison makes jokes about sleeping with his assistant in the wake of a #MeToo scandal. He allows Bradley Jackson (played by Reese Witherspoon) to go off-script in an interview with one of Mitch’s accs, asking questions that may reveal the network’s complicity. When his boss, Fred, tells him he’s set to play the fall guy, Ellison gleefully exclaims, “Chaos, it’s the new cocaine, Fred!” And when Chip is planning a coup to overthrow Fred, Ellison tells him how to do it. In a 2019 interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Crudup said, “[Cory] thinks that everybody is in the middle of the game that he is playing, and so he's kind of like a lion tamer, and this is the three-ring circus to him."
As to why Crudup’s Ellison is so gleefully fearless among The Morning Show's cast of characters, the viewers are left mostly in the dark. In the first season’s episode 2, “A Seat at the Table,” Ellison tells Bradley he was a “smart kid. Dad left. Mom raised me. Vowed to take over the world one day and kick everyone’s ass into submission.” But no other insight is really offered. In another 2019 interview, Crudup explained, “The crucial thing is: he understands the system as it is, and he’s not afraid of the system as it’s changing because there’s no evidence yet to that he doesn’t know how to figure it out.” [via GQ]
The Morning Show season 2 is set at the beginning of 2020, a year brimming with fear. In episode 1, Ellison’s unabashed ion for progress and his lack of self-doubt continue, but instead of throwing bombs, he is trying to sustain the new system he has built. The year has just begun, however, and it is not an easy guess to try and predict how Ellison will handle the invisible, uncontrollable threat of coronavirus.
The next episode of The Morning Show airs Friday, September 24th on Apple TV+.