Here’s why The Morning Show decided to set its second season on the cusp of COVID
Morning Show EP Mimi Leder says a show about a newsroom should probably stay up on the news
TV Features The Morning Show
If you’ve had enough of COVID-centric entertainment but you love Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, we’ve got some bad news for you. The Morning Show, which premieres its second season this Friday, has placed its new stories squarely in the run-up to the global pandemic. There are other things going on, of course, including #MeToo politics, corporate intrigue, and blossoming romances, but it’s all punctuated with comments about how long we actually should be washing our hands and whether or not the virus will ever make it out of China.
We recently sat down for a video chat with Mimi Leder, the show’s executive producer and director, to talk about how The Morning Show’s creators aimed to thread the needle of “we can mention the pandemic, but we don’t want to get too topical, lest it be over by the time this comes out.” Leder said the show had just started filming its second season before it was forced to shutdown on March 12, 2020. That move led the team to “really reevaluate what story we were trying to tell because we are a news show reflecting the world and we felt we could tell the story of the three months leading into COVID because we all lived it and experienced it.”
Leder says the show’s new season will focus on “when the tidal wave came and changed our lives and when the news pretty much didn’t even know what was happening and how to report it,” a move that makes a lot of sense considering The Morning Show is, in fact, a show about a television morning show. “We took that lead and we told it through the lens of our characters and their individual storylines,” says Leder.
Don’t worry, though: The new season isn’t all mask jokes and musings about how to pronounce “Wuhan.” Rather, Leder says, “The fallout this season is about identity and there’s no discussion of identity without discussing race, cancel culture and sexuality.”
The first episode of The Morning Show’s new season hits Apple TV+ exclusively this Friday, September 17.
33 Comments
looool that is a DISASTROUS decision but the first season was incredibly bad (the pitch was Succession for people with an 80 IQ) so good riddance
nah, first season was good, actually. probably the best acting aniston has ever done.
Interesting take, but actually the first season was horrible yet entertaining.
really? ‘horrible but entertaining’ seems like a much more interesting take!
Oh yes I watched and enjoyed it and will watch the second season as well. But I can also recognize that it is very very bad.
It was fitfully entertaining at best, mostly when Billy Crudup was on screen.
Low bar.
Morning Show EP Mimi Leder says a show about a newsroom should probably stay up on the newsIt worked for The Newsroom!
For all its faults, I really liked The Newsroom’s decision to take place a couple years in the past (and show them reacting to/dealing with real, then-contemporary events). I found it really easy to connect emotionally with the characters’ responses to events when they were real events I was familiar with. Made-up events, even if they mimic real-world ones, don’t quite have the same impact.
I agree. I think one of the major complaints with Studio 60 is that it was about a hilarious comedy writer but the jokes weren’t that funny so you just had to suspend your disbelief when the crowd went wild. I thought the Newsroom was a reaction to this criticism, so with the benefit of hindsight the could put together solid news segments and you could be like “these guys are good at their jobs.”
My two biggest problems with Studio 60 were:1. It treated the production of a late-night sketch show with the same importance that The West Wing treated the presidency of the United States2. They should have taken the same tack 30 Rock did, which was to never show a full sketch and never try to assert they were funny. The sketches on 30 Rock only existed to let characters like Tracy and Jenna show how insane they were.As much as I can absorb endless amounts of Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue and dramatic moments, that show really took completely the wrong approach to the material. It could have been a lot better if it had been on HBO or something where they could let loose, but a network drama at the time was still limited by S&P. Having Steven Weber’s asshole executive character not be able to curse people out just made the whole thing feel defanged.
Problem was that with Newsroom Sorkin took the “these guys are good at their jobs” vibe from SportsNight and West Wing, which were already idealized versions of the people involved, to ludicrous extremes. This also flew in the face of what most people intuitively know about TV newscasters in the modern age.
The biggest problem with Studio 60 is that it had no interest in actually telling stories about a comedy show (and utterly lacked the comic chops to do so, anyway.) Rather, it was all about the war on terror, filtered through the perspectives of people working on a comedy show. Like Aaron Sorkin immediately realized he had no interest in his premise and tried to smuggle in an entirely different concept.
Eh, I think that would (or should) limit how you integrate your characters into the real-life history, because otherwise you substantially rewrite it to feature your characters either subsuming or overwriting real people, or they’re constantly on the periphery. While that is a choice you can make, I can’t imagine The Morning Show being able to do any of what it did very well if it straight-out made Matt Lauer the disgraced newsman rather than having Carrell play a, evocatively similar but very different character.
I had no issue with the Newsroom’s take on it.But that aside, something I loved about Halt and Catch Fire was that it defied the viewer’s expectations that the characters would have a major role in history by sticking them eternally on the periphery of the computer revolution and having the characters actually fail ultimately.
Find a way to watch The Newsreader, an Australian show set in a TV newsroom back in 1986, starring Anna Torv (Fringe).
As said, I’m hearing echoes of The Newsroom. Now, what I’m wondering is, is writing a current events show just not possible, or is writing a current affairs show not possible in the current political climate?
The difficulty is that you’re by necessity going to be weeks out of date at best and whatever angle your characters take on a story is potentially going to look extremely stupid if some development occurred that you didn’t take into account.
I go with “not possible.” A show like this is best off making up new stories, or at most occasionally basing them on some sort of ripped from the headlines types of topics. And even that risks being too on the nose.
One of the Newsroom’s problems is Sorkin couldn’t resist his Smartest Man in the Room impulses to use the time elapsed since actual events to make the show’s take on those events much more spot-on than one reacting in real time could EVER be. It was an annoying cheat using hindsight.
Both seasons of The Newsroom were better than the meh overhyped first season of The Morning Show.
The Newsroom was never actually good, but it was better than The Morning Show.
Morning news shows are nearly as inconsequential as they are informative….why am I supposed to care about a fictional one, exactly?
Probably for the actors, characters and storylines because it’s a fictional tv show.
you do realize that most all TV shows are fictional, right?
Fictional, yes…but most fiction aims to be about something interesting.
From the ads I have seen, “The Morning Show” seemingly aspires to tell the story of the meaningless as though it was deeply meaningful. If I wouldn’t make time for the official TV show of waiting rooms everywhere…why would I want to watch a show about how the sausage-free sausage is made?
Cue the Heavy (-handed) Foreshadowing …
I am really looking forward to season 2. Season 1 was excellent.
Oh cancel culture! Great! Haven’t heard enough about that bullshit yet!
Great show. A little nervous about the second season, though.Apple TV has a lot of really good shows, though. (TMS, Ted Lasso, Dickinson, For All Mankind, Mythic Quest, Servant)
The Good Fight does all this better. Instead of trying to play “remember when” with the news, it dives head-first into the insanity of the current moment and isn’t afraid to throw in a few surrealist twists to get closer to the emotional (if not factual) truth of living in this era. It’s way more fun and emotionally anchored.
This show is vastly underrated by people who stopped after the first three episodes. The acting is top class and I trust Mimi in whatever she does.The other person of note involved in The Leftovers. So yeah, I trust her.Easily in ATVs top three. The other being For All Mankind and Mythic Quest.
Apple has very few good shows, but obviously Ted Lasso is the best.
Did Season 1 do this? I don’t think so. Trump was POTUS. Not a peep.