Season Two Dawns for Apple TV’s The Morning Show

The acclaimed hit adds new characters and new directions for its highly-anticipated return

The acclaimed hit adds new characters and new directions for its highly-anticipated return

A tense first season of the Apple TV+ flagship drama culminated in morning show hosts Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) exposing their network’s in-house sexual misconduct and the internal knowledge of it on live television. As Bradley encouraged people to speak up about corporate corruption and break the culture of silence, the feed was cut off.

We return to The Morning Show just seconds after this possibly career-ending moment. “We have a very energized entrance into season two,” promises Aniston. “Then, we deal with the repercussions of what season one handed us. You see the struggles, the outcasts, the cancel culture. Everyone’s walking around with their own guilt of what they allowed to happen.”

The series that explored the emergence of the #MeToo movement had intended to delve much deeper into the themes it set up in the first season. Then, after shooting the second season opener for two weeks, the world shut down due to COVID-19. As a show about current events, there seemed to be no choice but to start over. “We cover the world and the news, and we felt it was really important for us to look at it in an honest way,” says executive producer and director Mimi Leder. “The season now deals with the empty streets of New York. We’re in a shutdown and it’s ghostly, and then we cut to three months earlier before we knew that the world was going to change.”

In those few months before our immediate concerns shift dramatically, this on-screen universe, now months after the finale, still shakes from the tremors of Alex and Bradley’s on-air decision. “It’s right before the pandemic, and we’re dealing with our newfound power and what our relationship to power is as women inside of a news media organization,” says Witherspoon.

Part of that includes delving into identity, which is a principal theme for both main characters this season. “Alex goes on an enormous journey of self-discovery and part of the discovery is this tremendous amount of guilt that she has about her past relationship with Mitch [Steve Carell],” says Leder. “Her character has a lot of fear. She lost her foundation, and it’s left her to explore who she is and what she wants.” Bradley, meanwhile, is torn between her work life and her personal desires. “This season we were exploring Bradley’s sexuality, and that was an exciting storyline to dive into because a big part of Bradley’s identity is never claiming who she is,” says Leder.

This was a character journey Witherspoon enjoyed tremendously. “I feel like Bradley’s very vulnerable,” she says. “She’s really questioning the places she came from and her place inside the world. I think that was a really fun part to play, because I know so many people who are in their 40s and still discovering who they are. It was really meaningful.”

The beginning of season two lays down the groundwork for storylines tackling systemic racism, homophobia and ageism. And then, of course, the world slips off its axis. “We’re all very invested in our own struggles and our own pursuits, and then something even bigger than all of us is happening in the world,” says Witherspoon, who is proud of how the show handled the global crisis. “This pandemic has been devastating for the world in so many different ways, so addressing it with thoughtfulness and a real focus on humanity was very important to us.”

If, on-screen, the confusion of the early days of COVID reigns, behind the scenes, the show ran like a military mission. “We were a troop of little warriors running around trying to tell the best story we could and make it look seamless,” says Leder. “We never left Los Angeles, and this season we’re in Italy, we’re in Las Vegas, and obviously we’re in New York. It was very challenging to trick the eye, and it was an enormous undertaking to film on this level because The Morning Show is a very detailed and layered piece of work.” Being able to rise to the occasion has been extremely gratifying for the industry vet. “Anything risk-taking is like falling off a cliff—do you land on your feet or do you fall on your face?” says Leder. “It’s thrilling to tell this story and I think we’ve done it with humour and with great drama.”

To Aniston, it remains important not to simplify complex issues but to really delve into the nuances of uncomfortable subjects. “You want to hear the conversations that are taking place behind closed doors, the conversations that people don’t feel they can have out loud, because they’ll be outcast immediately,” she says. “We want to portray the grey areas, as opposed to the black and whites that the world sometimes can put upon people.” That said, being a show that depicts modern history in the moment is just as nerve-wracking as it sounds. “It’s a lot of responsibility,” says Aniston. “But it keeps it exciting.”

The Morning Show streams Fridays on Apple TV+