As Celine Dumont, Marion Cotillard was polished, poised, scary, and then ultimately unhinged, all adjectives that make for a great television villain.
Photo: Apple TV+
The funniest thing that’s happened on television this fall is a ten-second sequence in the finale of The Morning Show in which Marion Cotillard runs down a hallway in slow motion while “Porcelain” by Moby plays. As soon as I saw it on a screener, I burst out laughing, hit the go-back-ten-seconds button, and replayed it again and again. My co-workers looked on with concern and confusion, so I played the clip for them, and they laughed too. Maybe not as much as I did, but c’est la vie. They did not know the whole history of Celine Dumont, which is, of course, the name of Cotillard’s character, and did not quite understand how hilarious it is that Celine and her immaculate bob are running down a hallway clutching a gigantic purse and wearing equally as gigantic strapped heels. They did not understand that Celine Dumont is the funniest thing that has ever happened to me personally, to The Morning Show as a whole, and to the streaming service recently rebranded as Apple TV without a plus sign. To be clear, they did still laugh, though. It’s objectively a funny sequence on its own.
But let’s get into the context anyway. If you possess the gene that allows you to digest it properly — I assume it’s akin to the one that makes cilantro taste like soap — you understand that The Morning Show is the best show on television. It’s not a good program or even a well-made one. I would never say that. But in its luxe production values, top-shelf cast, and hallucinogenic plotting, the series provides high-gloss entertainment of the kind that few other television programs even attempt. The show began its first, and weakest, season as a story about Me Too. Reese Witherspoon’s Bradley Jackson played the newcomer to a Today show–esque program, and Jennifer Aniston was the rival star of the old guard, Alex Levy, who had a compromised friendship with a Matt Lauer figure played by Steve Carell. Since then, things have only gotten more lurid and much better: The stars of TMS have been through COVID, lesbian awakenings involving Julianna Margulies, the launch of a streaming service, a car crash off a cliff in Italy (that eliminated Carell), and a trip to space on a ship that wasn’t not Blue Origin — and that was before Katy Perry did it! Bradley Jackson, always a pioneer.
But nothing has been as much fun as this season’s introduction of Celine Dumont, an executive running the newly merged UBN network. There are a few things that made Celine immediately attention-grabbing. For one: French! Apple TV, which produces French dramas like La Maison, Drops of God, and Carême, is committed to Francophilia for reasons that are mysterious to me but probably have to do with tax breaks and/or Tim Cook wanting to maintain a Duolingo streak. But Celine’s nationality is all the more resonant because the season is set in 2024 and UBN has somehow won the rights to air the Paris Olympics. You would think that Celine might be directly involved in that plotline — when I saw that Cotillard was joining the season, I assumed she would be an IOC executive or something — but she isn’t until the very end of the season, which is amazing.
There are other amusing aspects of Celine’s characterization. The show’s writers, trying to make some sort of point about America’s rightward swing, decided that though UBN is now run by women, Celine would be vaguely anti-woke. There is a bit of commentary here about the show’s Me Too origins and the way in which the media has swung all the way around to excusing heinous men, though in the mode of someone repeating a take they half-remember hearing on an episode of The Daily. When Celine, Alex, and Greta Lee’s AI-obsessed character, Stella, are in meetings, Celine’s always the one who insists it’s just good business to keep promoting white men and pandering to conservatives. She’s a sort of Continental Bari Weiss, dreamed up before Weiss took over CBS. It’s easy to imagine Celine emailing all her employees and asking, “Uhhh, que fais-tu?”
Also, crucially, Celine got entangled in romantic shenanigans, which now drive more and more of the show’s action, even if the chemistry between its pristine stars is never really there. She’s introduced with a trophy husband, played by the gorgeous Aaron Pierre, who, of course, cheats on her with Stella. That leads to the second-funniest sequence on television this fall, after Cotillard sprinting down a hallway: when Stella’s AI deepfake malfunctions in a product demo and starts announcing all her secrets to a tech conference. That couldn’t have happened without the introduction of Celine, so another point for her. After Stella’s fall, Celine gets over her own heartbreak by launching into a fling with Billy Crudup’s Cory Ellison, the human embodiment of cocaine, who is nursing his own flame for Bradley Jackson. The pairing hardly makes any sense on a character level, but Cotillard and Crudup are both such gonzo performers that I couldn’t help but enjoy watching them act out their little sex bender.
But what truly made Celine compelling was the way the show developed the character’s villainy over the course of the season, which let Cotillard play unhinged in the way only she can. As Bradley and Alex investigated various conspiracies — Bradley is very invested in dead birds; later on, she ends up in Belarus — they realized everything came back to the cover-up of a chemical spill. And who was responsible for that chemical spill? Why, bien sûr, Celine’s family’s evil megacorporation, a conglomerate that lies somewhere between LVMH, DuPont oil, and the Sheinhardt Wig Company. Once The Morning Show introduces their existence, things get really fun: Early on in the season, Celine insists that she has fallen out with her French relatives, mostly owing to that relationship with Aaron Pierre, but by the last run of episodes, her brother is back in her office berating her about her missteps while she fires back about how he is doing a bad job cleaning up the Seine in time for the Olympics. (Yes, that is how they circle back to the Olympics.) By the finale, Celine is doing everything she can to keep Bradley in Belarusian prison so that shame does not fall upon her family and leur contamination du terre, which is why she ends up sprinting down that hallway.
By that point, Cotillard has fully embraced her performance as the season’s big bad, leaning into a level of sneering villainy that made me think she missed her chance to play a vampire who is maybe also a public figure or French exchange student on Buffy. See, after that sex bender, Cory has a change of heart and grows a conscience for reasons related to the death of his mom, and he tricks Celine into ranting on speakerphone about how she wants Bradley to rot in prison forever so she can’t reveal what the Dumonts were up to. Celine speaks into her phone, Cory holds his phone up to a microphone at a press conference, and then Celine hears her words echoing through the televisions she’s watching in her office. In shock and fury, she yells at her underlings, shouts at her frère in furious French, then sprints down that hallway without bothering to change into more walkable shoes. She ends the season climbing into a private jet with her brother, heading off toward her family’s residence at Cap-Ferrat, where her father is devising some ominous punishment for her. Straight to bed without crème brûlée for you, missy.
This is probably the last we’ll see of Celine on The Morning Show since Marion Cotillard is a big enough name to have better things to do than return in a smaller role next season. But mon dieu, it was fun to watch her play a big bad in this one. No one can commit to absurdity with quite the same level of intensity as Cotillard — remember when she kept trying to get Leonardo DiCaprio to kill himself with her in Inception? — and if The Morning Show’s plot runs on rails as rickety as a mine path in Donkey Kong, she gracefully leans into every bump and swerve. As Celine, she was polished, poised, scary, and then ultimately unhinged, all adjectives that make for a great television villain. Cotillard may have an Academy Award and the sort of highbrow artistic prestige Americans tend to reflexively ascribe to French artists, but she makes for an incredible kook (in her interviews as well as her performances) and really spreads her wings whenever she’s asked to go big. She can furrow her brow with Gallic contempt like no other — and, God, what a great bob, what a fun collection of pantsuits. Celine, if you never return to the halls of UBN, you’ll always be slo-mo running through them in mon cœur.
