“The Morning Show”, Apple TV+: In the dark night of the soul, it’s always 3 o’clock in the morning.

Lost in the haze of working days working from home and weekend days weekending from home, I opened my MacBook on Monday evening in search of escape, entertainment and white noise. At first glance, I concluded that I have purchased over ten films and TV shows from Apple since the lockdown started and that I have re-watched all of them several times over (no news there).

At second glance, I pressed play on the pilot of “The Morning Show” – “In the dark night of the soul, it’s always 3 o’clock in the morning.”

This is probably the fourth time that I have started re-watching the show, mainly because I enjoyed the finale so much the first time around that I had to see everything again and capture the fine details, the third time because “why not” and the fourth time because I needed a break from the lockdown mundane as already stated.

“The Morning Show” starts when the high-profile co-anchor Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) is accused of sexual misconduct and fired from the UBA network/New York. This sends his co-host Alex Levy (Jen Aniston) into overdrive to keep her job and life together, the show team and network frazzling to balance a rocky boat, their place in it, and their role in how the situation had transpired. There enters Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), a feisty “I don’t fit the mould” “boots on the ground” reporter from West Virginia, thrust into the Twitter-sphere by a fit of rage she had when reporting from a local coal mine – and later into the role of the “fresh” co-host of the show.

The story unpacks a little further and puts the spotlight on top executives such as Fred Micklen, aware of Mitch Kessler’s misconduct and sweeping it under the carpet, women who cast a blind eye to it, survive it (Mia Jordan), succumb to it (Hannah Shoenfeld) or choose to speak up about it and dramatically tell the truth in the finale.

The executive producer Chip Black who shepherds the flock of “The Morning Show” and blows the whistle on Mitch Kessler to The Times in a bid to protect Alex’s job, Cory Ellison, the Head of the News Division, cleverly and humorously versed in Sun Tzu’s Art of War, looking to jig things around, delivering some sage words of management along the way, and Maggie Brenner, the eagle-eyed New York Magazine reporter with a keen nose for the real news behind the news.

Extras that add further nuance to the tableau, such as the weatherman – PA couple who have really hit it off, even if it doesn’t sink in until later, the guy who gets privately tipped for the coveted co-anchor seat but is never really a contender in public, Bradley’s recovering brother who flat calls out his mom for the lies she’s telling, and Alex’s family, not much more than a supportive pawn to the kingship of her sterling job. All painted against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, the Las Vegas shooting of 2017, the California wildfires and the private firefighters who publicly fought them.

Tied together in a build-up of drama, blood-curling moments, hysterics and humour, ulterior motives and personal moves, great monologues and confrontations that surprisingly manage to be “Shakespearean in scope” and captivating despite “The Morning Show” coming out of Silicon Valley and Cory Ellison’s self-deprecating “We’re all going to get bought out by tech, unless something changes.” Exploding live on air and onto the world stage to the synchronised violin of Antonio Vivaldi just as Mitch Kessler realises his career is over and Alex and Bradley rat out the network’s enabling management before they get cut off.

You might not watch “The Morning Show” four times like I am just about to, but it might provide a temporary and refreshing distraction from everything around if you decide to give it a one-time go.