I couldn’t get into The Morning Show. I did try. I spent two seasons listening to people tell me it was messy and silly and sometimes fun, which, to me, a person who gleefully recapped a show about crazed animals waging a war against humans and got really into a melodramatic show about fleece-wearing finance bros doing battle with Paul Giamatti and sometimes doing synthetic speed in the office, is basically a love song. But I just couldn’t do it. Even with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell and a collection of the most bonkers storylines you’ve ever seen committed to the small screen. Oh well, I thought. Worth a try. Plenty of other shows out there.
But then I saw reviews trickle in for the third season. And I clicked on all of them, in part because I’m curious and in part because I’m unwell and in part because some of them, like this one by Alison Herman at Variety, contained paragraphs like this, which tickled all the little goofball receptors in my brain.
We open in the spring of 2022, two years since the onset of the pandemic and the end of Season 2. The TMS crew have been offered up as guinea pigs for Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), a billionaire and aerospace pioneer who’s basically a more telegenic Elon Musk (or a younger Richard Branson, or a Jeff Bezos with hair). For some inexplicable reason, this creature of Silicon Valley has taken an interest in legacy media, so to lay the path for a potential acquisition, network CEO Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) wants to give Marks’ latest rocket launch a friendly face and send an anchor into orbit. So does Season 3 start on a quite literal high note, though “The Morning Show” must soon turn to the mess back on Earth.
Here we are, a little over a week after I first read that paragraph, and two important things have happened:
- I still do not actually “watch” The Morning Show
- I started doing this thing where I open an episode and skip through to the scenes with Jon Hamm and then I watch those few minutes, make a bunch of screencaps, and then launch forward until he shows up again
It’s a fascinating and probably unprofessional way to consume a television show. I can’t stop doing it. Jon Hamm is just so good, all the time, even when he’s playing a real-life cartoon character masquerading as a tech bro. Here he is in a sauna with Billy Crudup doing business deals.
Here he is showing Jennifer Aniston his many acres of pristine real estate in the west, right after, no joke, hauling ass with her around it all in a dune buggy.
And here he is inside his own rocketship getting ready to blast off into space with Reese Witherspoon on live television, which happened in the same episode he whipped around the desert in a dune buggy with Jennifer Aniston. This would be a really fun thing to explain to someone at the peak of Mad Men’s fame when Hamm was playing the most serious man on television in one of the best shows ever made. It’s also fun to explain to people today. You should see the smile on my face as I’m typing this. Look at this guy.
And I realized as I was watching it that the reason I was so happy is, like, good for Jon Hamm, man. He seems like a guy who has it figured out. Again, he played Don Draper for like a decade. He’s in the television Hall of Fame forever just for that. He could probably have his pick of a zillion projects. He could line up pretentious prestige shows one after another and stroll into the Emmys every year if that’s what he really wanted to do.
But instead, he’s just doing… cool stuff. I can’t think of a better way to phrase it. Scroll through his filmography sometime. He’s popped up on 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt as huge weirdos. He’s played heightened and comedic versions of himself in Barry and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He voiced a cartoon scallop in Big Mouth and narrated the insane tennis mockumentary 7 Days in Hell. He played Fletch in the criminally underrated and under-discussed Confess, Fletch that dropped last year. He showed up in Top Gun: Maverick as the hardass military guy who is fed up with Tom Cruise’s loose-cannon shenanigans. It’s like he looks at potential roles and says “Hmm, would this be kind of awesome?” and then bases his decision on that. I respect this so much.
I also respect that he pops up on SNL every now and then and does an incredibly stupid sketch that makes fun of his last name.
I shouldn’t like this. I should hate him a little bit. He’s too talented and too good-looking to also have things figured out this well. The degree of difficulty here is through the roof. And yet… here I am, zooming through a show I don’t even watch to make screencaps of him going to outer space with Elle Woods. I don’t know. Part of me feels like I’m writing this just to try to make sense of it all. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m just really happy for Jon Hamm.
And it gets better, too. He’s also going to appear in the new season of Fargo — one of our best shows — opposite the also-great Juno Temple. Look how excited the producers are about working with Jon Hamm.
“Jon Hamm is Jon Hamm. Every actor should have a resume like that. I mean, remarkable,” Littlefield says. “Dot needs a great adversary to tell this story and we felt that Jon could really sing from that hymnal, that he could be that North Dakota sheriff who really, really bought into an entire world philosophy, a rigidity, and he has an ax to grind and so he is such a critical pillar in Dot’s story, the reveal of who she is, what is her past.”
He calls Hamm’s portrayal “wonderfully menacing” throughout the season. “We feel his muscle, his dramatic muscle,” he says, “but he’s also Jon Hamm, so you’re like, ‘Oh my god, did he do that?'”
God, I’m excited for this already. And I’m excited for Jon Hamm to continue following his heart around Hollywood. And I’m excited because I have another ridiculous screencap to show you from The Morning Show. Remember how I said his character is a billionaire who is obsessed with blasting rockets into space? Well, guess if his rocket looks so much like a massive penis that I busted out laughing when I zipped past it on my speedwatch.
It’s so beautiful I could cry.
And, as if all that wasn’t enough, as if Jon Hamm hasn’t been just generally killing it in a way most actors can never wrap their arms around because they’re too needy or ambitious or both, there was also this report in Page Six last week.
“Jon Hamm, will you help us play a song? Jon Hamm, are you here?,” Beck called out from a makeshift area set up at the small basement bar following his show at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.
The “Mad Men” star then joined the “Loser” singer and went ham, belting out the entirety of the Cars 1978 hit, “Just What I Needed,” in front of music heavy hitters like the Strokes’ Julian Casablanca and their manager Ryan Gentles, the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney, the Moldy Peaches’ Adam Green and Brit rockers, the Arctic Monkeys.
Don Draper is out here singing with Beck in real life and launching himself into space in phallic spaceships on soapy television shows all in the last week. It’s all so cool I could puke. He seems like he’s having exactly as much fun as Jon Hamm should be having. And he seems like a really solid dude, too, which is one of the highest compliments I have to give.
I’ll close with this from the Page Six report about him singing with Beck.
“He really added some Hamm-bience,” joked one guest, as many chattered about how well Don Draper can sing.
Two things are true here:
- I feel like Jon Hamm would appreciate this awful play on words
- I am so proud of whoever said that and got it into print
We’re all doing great here. You, me, the Hamm-bience guy, all of us. But Especially Jon Hamm, though. That dude is just crushing it.
