‘MORNING’ AFTER
Season 2 eyes women after #MeToo with COVID backdrop
Season 2 of “The Morning Show” was to focus on the fallout from the sexual misconduct that permeated Season 1 like a plague.
Then another kind of plague hit.
The show was only 13 days into filming when the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down on March 12, 2020, executive producer Mimi Leder told the Daily News. With no idea what the world would look like when they came back, let alone if they would ever be able to, the writers and producers tossed most of their scripts and instead built a season around a pandemic and what it looked like from inside a newsroom.
When the second season returns to Apple TV+ Friday, “The Morning Show” will offer haunting flashbacks to Wuhan evacuations, explaining social distancing and scrambling to find masks and tests.
“[Showrunner] Kerry Ehrin wanted to start it at this moment before the world changed, a moment we had lived through,”
Leder told The News. “We knew how to tell that story. It was hard to tell any story past March (2020) because the world changed so enormously.”
They’re telling that story in a newsroom where Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy and Reese Witherspoon’s Bradley Jackson exorcised the demons from the building, a group of men up and down the call sheet who at worst perpetuated and at best turned a blind eye to a culture of sexual misconduct.
When COVID came, the scandal that shook the network fictional UBA network did not disappear: beloved host Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) had used his charm and his power to force women into bed.
He’s been ousted — at one point, Alex laughs that his version of “canceled” is a mansion in Italy — but the women are left; some who knew firsthand, some who heard whispers and some who were in denial.
“The show is really about identity and that’s what we wanted to explore in this season,” Leder told The News.
“If the first season was about the fallout of #MeToo, then this season is about examination, guilt, regret, fear, self-preservation.”
Alex and Bradley circle around each other for most of the season, one pushing while the other pulls and then switching. They need each other but neither will admit that.
Instead, they are largely left to deal with their self-reflection alone or, in Bradley’s case, sometimes with new friend Laura Peterson (Juliana Margulies), a “Morning Show” alum who Leder described as “a Diane Sawyer type.”
Both women are fighting the risk, like Mitch, of being canceled, Alex for her relationship to the disgraced host and Bradley for secrets she’s hiding that she considers personal business.
There is no attempt to draw a line down the middle: men bad, women good; men perpetrators, women victims. “The Morning Show” acknowledges that women, too, can uphold the patriarchy.
Mitch is still the villain, but he is not alone.
“We don’t exonerate Mitch, and we don’t forgive him. He has to live in his world of sin and everything he has done. He’s in a prison of his own making,” Leder told The News.
But what of the people outside of Mitch’s prison?
“When you love someone who’s done horrible things, do you still love them?” Leder said. “You can, but things can never go back.”