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
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.