Major spoilers for season 1 of The Morning Show below.
After a splashy season 1 debut on AppleTV+, The Morning Show is coming back for a second installment. The series garnered awards attention for stars Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, with Aniston winning a Screen Actors Guild award. The show also received eight Emmy nominations in July. But the wait for season 2 continues, as the series has taken an indefinite hiatus from filming due to COVID-19 concerns.
“God, I can’t wait to get back to work. Just talking about it, it gets me,” Aniston recently told Deadline. “And Season 2, it’s getting so good.” Below, everything we know about the next season, including which social issue it’ll explore after #MeToo.
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When will season 2 of The Morning Show be released?
A week after the show debuted, Apple confirmed that The Morning Show would return for a second season. The renewal comes alongside some of its other series—Dickinson and See, per Variety. Just as the first season premiered in November 2019, showrunner Kerry Ehrin told Variety, “We’re writing the show now; we’ll film it this summer; and we’ll be on next November.” However, the outlet clarified that sources close to the show told them no official premiere date for the second season was set.
Apple
Now, the show’s release will be impacted by a filming hiatus due to concerns over COVID-19. “In concert with our dedicated partners at Apple, we have concluded it would be prudent to take a two-week hiatus to assess the situation and ensure the safety of the incredible people who make this show,” producer Michael Ellenberg, founder and CEO of MediaRes, said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter in mid-March. The show has not yet resumed filming.
What will the second season be about?
In the aftermath of an explosive first season finale, Ehrin told The Hollywood Reporter that the news network will be picking up the pieces of its systemic sexual harassment issue. “It’s like a huge building fell on everybody and it’s about escaping from the wreckage,” she told the outlet.
At the end of the show’s first season, co-hosts Alex Levy (Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon) expose network boss Fred Mickland (Tom Irwin) and implicate Alex’s ex Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) for their roles in a toxic work environment. The on-air speech is given spontaneously and against the clock, moments after the pair learns that producer Hannah Schoenfeld (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), whom Mitch sexually assaulted, died of a drug overdose. Part of the finale reckoning involves Alex owning her own complicity in Kessler’s behavior.
When the feed on the broadcast is suddenly cut, uncertainty about the network, morning show, and its co-anchors looms. “I would say season 2 is a lot about transition,” Ehrin told The Hollywood Reporter. “And still, at the same time, a lot of the same shit goes on! You set new rules, but then it falls back. This is true in the real world. Where it becomes: Are we paying lip service to women’s rights?”
Courtesy of AppleTV+Apple
In an interview with Variety, Ehrin discussed one direction the show won’t go in: current politics. “I don’t write to the news. It’s not that kind of a show,” she told the outlet when asked if a Trump-inspired character would ever join the show. “You can’t do current politics, so my idea is that if you deal with politics, you deal with political themes. I call it ‘current adjacent,’ where you’re not historically aging yourself by dealing with a specific thing, but you can take the zeitgeist of what is happening in the world and do something with those themes.”
How will the show address current issues related to the coronavirus and Black Lives Matter protests?
The direction of season 2 may permanently shift after the show’s months-long filming hiatus. Mark Duplass, who received one of eight Emmy nominations, told Deadline in July 2020 that the second season is being rewritten. “We shot two episodes before we shut down due to the pandemic,” he revealed, adding, “but I know that they’re also rewriting, which is crazy because that’s what happened in the first season. They had a whole set of scripts [then] and they rewrote everything to include the #MeToo movement, and now we’ve got other, larger, global phenomenon to deal with. I don’t know what they’re doing but I know they’re rewriting.”
Aniston confirmed the the rewrites to Deadline, adding that “a good six or maybe seven outlines” of the show were completed prior to the shutdown. “And then there was just this feeling, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, and the producers couldn’t put their finger on it, but it was like something’s missing and I don’t know what it is,” Aniston recalled. “And then the COVID crisis happened.”
The series star, who received her first Emmy nomination since Friends in 2004, says the scripts will reflect the world’s current transformation. “Now, again, Kerry is back to the drawing board, and we are incorporating COVID in a way that is so exciting. I mean, I’m not calling COVID exciting by any stretch of the imagination, but in terms of where season 1 ended, because the covers were being pulled on the network,” she explained. Aniston added that months of quarantine has led to “a lot of contemplation, and a lot of excavation, and a lot of inward work,” all themes that will be explored in season 2.
Will the original cast return?
Currently, Aniston, Witherspoon, and Crudup, who played news boss Cory Ellison, are all set to return. Ehrin told THR in December 2019 that the dynamic between the two leading women will be analyzed further in the sophomore season.
The interesting thing about Alex and Bradley is that they still barely know each other. They’ve known each other for like, three months of working together. If you work with someone for three months, you don’t know them super well. They’ve gone through two really traumatic experiences together, which has sort of forged their souls in a way. But they still don’t really know each other as people, so we’re playing some of that in the next season.
As for the fate of Steve Carell’s character, who gives a powerful direct look to camera at the end of the season, Ehrin explained to THR, “We would like him to be back in season 2. It’s in the works, but it’s not a done deal yet.”
Crudup wasn’t able to confirm Carell’s return to Deadline. But he did tell the outlet a journey of redemption for that character would be a decades-long process. “I feel like, if you put as many years of work into doing something acceptable that you’ve put into doing something that’s unacceptable, then I’ll talk to you,” Crudup explained to the outlet. “And if you want to begin to build your life back from there, fair enough. But if you put in as much work as Mitch did at undermining people and oppressing people and traumatizing people because you just didn’t have the time to give a damn, you’ve got a shit ton of work to do.”
Wait, how do you watch The Morning Show?
If the process of accessing AppleTV+ still escapes you, there are options for finding its content. The Apple TV app is $4.99 per month and includes a free seven-day trial. The app is available on several platforms, including:
- iPhone
- iPad
- Apple TV
- iPod touch
- Mac
- Select Samsung smart TVs
- Select Roku devices
- Online at tv.apple.com
Savannah Walsh
Editorial Fellow
Savannah Walsh is an Editorial Fellow at ELLE.com.
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