Morning Glory

Directed by Roger Michell

(PG-13)

**

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Morning Glory wants to be the “Broadcast News of happy-talk morning shows,” said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. But where that 1987 film ventured into a TV newsroom to offer a refreshingly adult mix of romance, repartee, and social observation, this “sillier and more superficial” movie is more like typical morning-show pap. Rachel McAdams plays a producer hoping to save a failing a.m. broadcast by pairing a news veteran (Harrison Ford) with the show’s daffy longtime host (Diane Keaton), said Peter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor. Yet instead of supporting her hard-news hero, McAdams’ character lets fluff prevail. Morning Glory thinks it’s addressing the dumbing down of TV news, but it’s actually “pandering to the audience that craves the dumbness.” But audiences can’t seriously expect a romantic comedy to “tackle the dilemmas of 21st-century television journalism,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. At least we’ve landed a modern-day Mary Tyler Moore in McAdams. This “skillful comedienne” not only turns the world on with her smile; she makes Morning Glory worth watching.