Ah, The Morning Show. Less a television series, really, than a vibe—plotlines that were topical two years ago, ageless female faces, constant chaos that you should simply allow to wash over you like rain. Does it make sense? Not at all. You could watch other shows, and you would never see this: Jennifer Aniston’s frown-acting, Reese Witherspoon’s pissed-off listlessness, Billy Crudup harnessing all the frantic charisma of Satan losing at poker. The first episode of the new season begins with the broadcast-morning-show host Alex Levy (played by Aniston) watching her own TV obituary, and ends with the news anchor Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon) in literal space, weeping in zero gravity while bemoaning the war in Ukraine. What other series has the creative capacity, the daring, the money to do something so grand and so pointless? TV like this is a gift.

And yet. The Morning Show is so close to something like greatness. You can see, in the new episodes, all of the ways in which the series knows what works (dazzling one-liners; the absurdity of a TV program that requires anchors to segue from pie-eating contests to racism) while also being handicapped by the most unshiftable hindrance of all: its stars. When it was first conceived, the show was the jewel in Apple TV+’s crown—a fictionalized adaptation of Brian Stelter’s 2013 book about the vicious world of morning-news programs whose premise set up two of America’s most beloved actresses to tussle over ratings.

However, the #MeToo allegations about the news anchor Matt Lauer prompted the series to retool itself around the subject of workplace predation, which clashed with its hammy, quippy, All About Eve–esque setup and left its two central characters somewhat adrift. The first season, for me at least, was a nonsensical volley between glorious excess and Sorkinian sincerity, never finding cohesion between the two. The second leaned closer toward cheerful camp but inexplicably decided to rewrite Steve Carell’s disgraced anchor, Mitch Kessler, as a flawed but tragic victim of cancel culture. Its characters were thinner than crepe paper, and multiple-episode arcs (about tell-all books and ominous lawsuits) were discarded when more enticing storylines came up.

[Read: What went wrong with The Morning Show?]

Having watched all of Season 3, I’ve come to the conclusion that the issue with the show’s two leads isn’t just that after 30 episodes of television, neither has yet managed to read a teleprompter with even a hint of animation. For The Morning Show to thrive, it needs either Alex or Bradley—or both—to embrace antiheroism, yet both are played by actors so recognizable and likable on-screen that explicit villainy seems well out of their range. The first episode of the new season, set in March 2022, loosely explains where the two women stand: Alex, having withstood an early and televised bout of COVID two years ago, has parlayed her “survivor” status into a hit streaming show called Alex Unfiltered; Bradley, thanks to her audacious footage from the U.S. Capitol on January 6, is now the country’s top evening-news anchor, reporting “controversial” stories that the network keeps threatening to kill. (Don’t think too hard about how Bradley went from being a field reporter for a local-news station in West Virginia to achieving Diane Sawyer–like status practically overnight despite constantly going off-script and not showing up to work for several weeks in Season 2, because it’ll make your brain hurt.)

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Season 3 has a new showrunner, a new team of writers, and, apparently, a new fascination with the business side of television. This last preoccupation is possibly a knock-on effect of Succession’s popularity, but it’s also possibly because Crudup’s Cory Ellison, an executive at The Morning Show’s parent network, United Broadcast Association, is the only person showing us what the series should be about: deranged ambition, unnerving pizzazz, extreme self-awareness. Knowing that UBA is basically broke, Cory has hatched a plan for a merger with a company owned by Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), a billionaire who’s into space rockets and filthy lucre. Standing only partially in the way is Greta Lee’s Stella Bak, UBA’s head of news, who previously worked with Paul and will only say, between gritted teeth, that he’s “ruthless.”

The season dips into serious and timely issues (the murder of George Floyd, the overturning of Roe v. Wade) but seems much more interested in creating set pieces that let Cory wield his offbeat magnetism. When he struts into a network presentation for advertisers, backslapping stars and glad-handing executives to the soundtrack of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” the music appears to be playing just for him, which has the effect of bringing us into his mind more than any other character’s. Late in the season, we get to witness a charged reunion between Cory and his mother (Lindsay Duncan) that’s loaded with more emotional violence than a Pinter play. Every other confrontation this season—Bradley and her Trump-supporting brother, Alex and the ultra-acquisitive board, Bradley and her icy ex-lover—has the tension of cheese curds by comparison. (The show adds a new presenter, Chris Hunter, played gracefully by Nicole Beharie, but it doesn’t let her have much of a good time.)

You can almost sense the writers’ relief at having someone as fiendish as Cory to write for. Imagine a series in which every character could be this peacocking, this nakedly self-interested, this fun. One of the new characters introduced in Season 3 is an unnamed anchor at a rival network who obsessively covers the turmoil at UBA, and who does so with more dynamism and interest than any on-air talent at The Morning Show has managed to muster. Meanwhile, even as Bradley makes one bad decision after another, Witherspoon plays her so sympathetically that we can’t condemn her. Alex gets close to revealing her lust for power, but Aniston resists giving us glimpses of her moral complexity. People will watch The Morning Show regardless, because this kind of star power is a hell of a hook. Still, I can’t help wondering if it’s also a curse—especially when there are actually interesting stories that a show could tell.