The Morning Show has enjoyed three nail-biting seasons focusing on the machinations UBA, a fictitious news channel and their two strong-willed anchors Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) striving for ratings, integrity, and career fulfilment. Showrunner Charlotte Stoudt shared her insights with Creative Screenwriting Magazine on the evolution and trajectory of the show.
“Kerry Ehrin started with a very definitive Me Too story in Season 1,” states the showrunner. “The focus was sexual misconduct and the way that sexual harassment and sexual intimidation is present in most workplaces at a variety of levels. I thought she did an incredible job with looking at all the ways that that plays out.”
“I also thought she did such a brave thing in asking the question of how are women complicit in patriarchy and how do ambitious women sometimes look the other way,” Stoudt continues. “I thought that was a really provocative thing to base the show on.”
Season 2 shifted away from themes of sexual misconduct. “I wanted to expand and look at other ways in which women’s agency is hindered, broken, stopped, and challenged. It felt like a lot of things going on in the world reflected that, especially a sort of reckoning with race in America through the George Floyd material. And also, just understanding that our Supreme Court had shifted to a much more conservative status.” The overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022 was part of the DNA and posed the question of whether women can control their own bodies and the ways their autonomy has been challenged.
I think the focus of the show will always be women’s autonomy and agency.
The Morning Show balances high drama with melodrama in its execution. “We’re living where there’s a context collapse. We’re living with the most trivial things discussed against the most serious things and they’re just bumped up right next to each other. So, I think the show tries to reflect that we’re in a world that feels schizophrenic. And I think it is really trying to capture that baseline anxiety we have.”
“After 9-11, you’re trying to get that texture of being in this world now. And it’s very hard to capture because it’s so weird.”
Keeping The News Current
News cycles are becoming notoriously shorter and the morning news may easily be forgotten by the evening. Its an indictment on our attention spans and our memories. This poses a challenge for the show which addresses current hot button issues and worldviews, but needs considerably longer to present them in a TV show format to ensure the longevity of the issues.
“We’re first driven by the DNA of the show by asking where the characters are,” says Stoudt. “So, whatever news events we choose, they have to reflect the struggles that the characters are going through.”
Specifically, the overturning of Roe v Wade raises wider issues of minority rule that can be applied to other legal rulings and can be examined a long time after the initial court ruling.
The Morning Show captures the current move from factually-based news to opinion on our screens. It toggles between news of the day and sensationalist pieces. Charlotte Stoudt calls it “fast and slow news. This is how the world works today. This is how power works now.” Stories are about attracting eyeballs on screens with celebrities and keeping them there. Audiences are seeking comfort viewing which affirms their beliefs. “We’ve gotten so tribal in our in our news consumption.”
The Thorny Relationship Between Alex Levy & Bradley Jackson
Alex and Bradley are The Morning Show. “They’re both ambitious. Alex has more integrity and more clout at UBA. Bradley’s a little more rebellious. She likes to push the envelope.”
The Morning Show might be broken down to a workplace buddy drama. “On some level it’s the love story of Alex and Bradley and their ups and downs,” quips Stoudt.
“There’s the wonderful irony that Alex brought in Bradley as a human shield against her potential firing. And then, that human shield turns around and says to Alex, ‘You’re just as bad as the rest of them.” This confrontation really challenges Alex morally. “So, what Alex thought was expedient and beneficial turns out to break her character open in a lot of ways.”
As the season arcs progress, Alex began as just an anchor without much power at UBA. “She felt like she was on an island and was not part of a community. She was just trying to save herself.” Alex realizes she has a lot more power and responsibility to change things. “What is she going to do with that power?” Much of these questions are instigated at Bradley’s behest. They interrogate each other.
Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) and Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
“I still think Alex’s humor and her bouts of narcissism are just wonderful and such a delicious part of her character. She’s not just straight arrow noble person,” adds Stoudt.
Alex also experiences a number of life and death situations ranging from Hannah’s death in Season 1 and her battle with COVID in Season 2. She’s plotting her comeback to UBA with more power in Season 3.
Bradley is a live wire. “Everything’s an argument. She keeps pushing and always tries to keep that angry kernel of her character. She is addicted to that place, and UBA is a very tempting drug because you go from being this local news reader to suddenly having a national profile and telling people the biggest stories in the world at 7.30 in the morning.”
Charlotte Stoudt notes that Bradley starts to betray her own code in Season 3. “I thought it would be interesting if she had forgotten her past until suddenly that bites her in the ass and she realizes she can’t fit this high powered-addicted self given she’s a girl from West Virginia. She can’t make them merge; she’s broken that open.”
Both Alex and Bradley are reaching slightly beyond themselves.
Despite their stoushes, Alex and Bradley bring out the best and worst in each other.
“Alex is the ultimate insider and she’s a pragmatist. I think she’s a person who is always looking for home and is confused as to why she can’t find it. Bradley is always going to be the outsider. In this coastal elite world, she’s always fundamentally going to be an outsider, even if she tells herself otherwise.”
“There’s such a profound class difference between the two of them and the way they were raised and grew up in the worlds they were in that’s never going to change. They are the odd couple.”
They are the best of friends. They compete and judge each other.
The Pilot Episode
The pilot generally refers the the first episode of the first season to set the stage. Each season of The Morning Show begins with its own “pilot” because it isn’t a seamless continuation of the previous one. However, each new season has to reset the stage as well as rehash old ground.
During Season 3, “I did want to do a little bit of a Freaky Friday where the two women are exchanging places because we have the notion that Bradley would get the evening news and that she thought she’d made it to the inside. She’s got excessive power, she become like Alex in her mind. She has a whole new look, she’s so glossy, urban, New York, and aspirational. She’s seeing herself as an insider, whereas Alex feels a little more like Bradley and her isolation at the top of Season 3.”
Alex has been divorced from her husband Jason for some time and the only man in her life is Chip (Mark Duplass), and that relationship is all about work. She’s looking for a purpose and meaning in her life beyond her career.
Corey Ellison (Billy Crudup) Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
“When she realizes that Corey’s (Billy Crudup) been making moves behind her back to sell UBA, Alex realizes she’s going to have to make bigger moves. So now, she’s the one who’s going to blow things up when it used to be Bradley.”
Inside The Writers’ Room
Charlotte Stoudt ensures there’s a healthy mix of backgrounds, genders, and life experiences in her writers’ room. Her first rule of ‘Write Club’ is to never hire carbon copies of herself. “Aim to hire people more talented.”
“Virginia Woolf said, ‘Shakespeare is an androgynous writer and I think all writers room should be androgynous and balance that male and female energy in every sense.”
The showrunner also notes that male writers aren’t necessarily defaulting to writing male characters and vice-versa.
“Because we’re in such a diverse world and we wanted to tackle issues like racism, I want to hear from writers with first hand experience. I’m grateful for Joshua Allen, who wrote the Chris interview episode. He put all of his experience in Hollywood as a black writer and said, ‘These are the kind of things that have been said to me.’” He elaborated on what he put up with in meetings. “He really opened a vein to do that. I wanted to say something that was resonant to other people that had his experience. So that’s an episode I could have never written and I’m just really, we had somebody on staff to write that.”
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