The Morning Show‘s Karen Pittman on the curse of “imposter syndrome”

Life never gets any easier for The Morning Show’s Mia Jordan. In season one of the Apple TV Plus show, Jordan—played ably by Karen Pittman—struggled against her co-workers side eyes and judgements around her past relationship with Steve Carell’s Mitch Kessler. Did she get her job because she deserved it, they wondered, or because of who she knew?

Now, in season two and with both Kessler and former Morning Show producer Chip Black ousted from the newsroom, Jordan is executive producing the whole shebang. Still, those whispers remain, sometimes even inside Jordan herself.

The A.V. Club sat down with Pittman to talk through that second guessing for the above video chat. Pittman says Jordan, like so many other characters on the show, is “dealing with a little bit of imposter syndrome.”

Pittman says she thinks The Morning Show’s audience is happy to see Jordan running the room, but acknowledges that “she’s gotten this opportunity when The Morning Show is at its worst, so she’s questioning her ability to do it because it’s got to be a Herculean task to get it back on track.”

Pittman says her character is wary of the return of Mark Duplass’ Chip Black, albeit in a lesser role on the show, saying “He’s not the worst of the worst, but he wasn’t necessarily an ally back when Mitch Kessler was at The Morning Show.”

She thinks it was a “stroke of genius” for the writers to bring back Black, who Mia “probably has an extraordinary amount of love for because he really did make a strong effort to keep her working on the show,” even when both Mitch and Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy refused to work with her. Still, Pittman says, Jordan sees Black as “a bit of an adversary in that he knows her job very well and probably could do it”

The Morning Show season 2 is airing now on Apple TV Plus. You can check out our overall review of the whole season right here.