A lot of the critics have compared Morning Glory unfavorably with Broadcast News. The only thing they have in common is that they both involve the production of news shows. Broadcast News used a romantic triangle to comment seriously on the dumbing down of television news. Morning Glory is actually a father-daughter reconciliation that takes it for granted that the conflict at the center of the earlier movie has been resolved. That's what makes it so depressing.
In Broadcast News, Albert Brooks calls William Hurt's amiable dim bulb of an anchorman the Devil. When Holly Hunter pulls him up on it, Brooks replies: "What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing... he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance... Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he'll get all the great women."
That was in 1987, when Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams), Morning Glory's central character, was five years old. Now is now. As Becky tells Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford), the grizzled ex-news god that she's dragooned into co-hosting her morning show, "the argument between news and entertainment went on for years, guess what -- your side lost!"
Becky is the Devil's daughter. Twenty-eight years old, and just having lost her job producing a New Jersey morning show on a shoestring, her dearest ambition in life is to work for Today. Instead, she gets hired to produce Daybreak the failing, fourth ranked network morning show. We learn later, as does she, that the network is about to pull the plug on the show. We suspect that she got the job because she was available, cheap, and too full of innocent young zeal to know what a mess she was getting into, and because no one with more sense and more standing wanted the job.
Not knowing any better, she sets out to do the job as she understands it, which means giving the morning show audience even more and better stunts, soft news, cute animals, celebrity features and other infotainment that it wants. Becky is completely unreflective and not the least bit cynical. She no more disapproves of what the audience wants than a sailor disapproves of the sea. It's her job to give them what they like.
Her great coup is to cast aging news legend Mike Pomeroy as the co-anchor alongside the former B-list beauty queen played by an underused Dianne Keaton. Pomeroy is an embittered, self-important relic of the days when network news was Important, an anchorman was an Authority, and Elaine's and 21 were the fashionable places to drink . He's been put out to pasture by a network that no longer wants or needs that style, paid millions to do nothing for the two remaining years on his contract. Becky reads the contract and figures out that Pomeroy has to take any on-air job the network offers him or lose the money, and she decides that he's a great piece of stunt casting. Oh, and by the way, she's idolized him ever since she was a little girl.
Pomeroy isn't having any. He hates what the news business has become, he hates the morning show format, and his contract gives him a veto over the stories he covers. While he has to work on the show, he doesn't have to work at it, and he sets out to thwart Becky by passive aggressive non-cooperation. He even refuses to say the word "fluffy" on the air. She has to win him over or the show will be cancelled and, more to the point, smart, earnest, hard driven but adorable Becky will be a disgraced failure at 28.
At one point, Pomeroy tells Becky she has "Daddy issues." He's right. We know, though Pomeroy doesn't, that Becky's dead father was both unhappily married and thwarted in his own ambitions, and that he passed on to her all of his hopes and dreams. We're not given a romance between Mike and Becky, thank God, but she's got to seduce him into becoming her substitute father and protector by giving up his own standards.
She does and he does, because dammit, he really likes the kid, and because she's a second chance after he blew his relationship with his own ex-wife and grown children. Mike goes out and scores a major hard news scoop for the show, just to prove that he can still do it. But then, at the crisis of Becky's career, Mike saves the day by devoting his craggy personality to an improvised cooking segment that resoundingly succeeds, mixing an Italian frittata recipe with stories of his dirty weekend with the famous but unnamed Italian actress who taught it to him. Just so Becky knows he's surrendered, Mike even describes the frittata as "fluffy," and he tells the audience that he'll be back next week with another segment.
In the last shot, Mike and Becky walk off into the sunset at the end of West 57th Street, like Rick and Louis at the end of Casablanca, bickering affectionately about whether or not to use his upcoming prostate exam as a segment on Daybreak. I bet she wheedles him into it. The Devil has won, and the future belongs to his children.
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