With The Morning Show named today as one of the AFI Awards’ 2023 honorees for television program of the year, the question arises, how will the Apple TV+ show possibly up the ante for Season 4?
Will Bradley be in jail ? Will Alex be running everything? And will Cory finally give up and go home to his mom to sing another round of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”? With the FBI, a company merger, and a sociopathic businessman (Jon Hamm) in the mix at the close of Season 3, it seems there’s everything to play for next season.
“Everybody keeps asking me if Bradley’s in jail,” Reese Witherspoon said during a press conference moderated by Deadline on Thursday, “but I don’t know if I’m in trouble.”
“But you’ve tried on jumpsuits, right?” executive producer Michael Ellenberg said.
“Did you decide on a shade of orange?” Jennifer Aniston joked.
During last season, Witherspoon (who also serves as EP on the show) saw her character Bradley Jackson quit her job and face law enforcement over her handling of her brother’s involvement in Jan 6. So, she may indeed be wearing that jumpsuit come next season.
“I think so many people can relate to the idea that you have a family history that maybe isn’t flattering or that you’re embarrassed about, or there’s a family member in your life that’s trying to actively drag you down,” Witherspoon said. “So, it was just really tender to play this woman who wanted so badly to succeed and excel, being pulled back down by the heavy weight of family obligations and her isolation.”
Witherspoon also noted that while Bradley’s mother has passed away her father is still very much alive. Would she want to bring his character back?
“I loved David Morse, the actor who played my dad in the first season,” she said. “He’s one of my favorite actors of all time. So, I hope he comes back. It was such an honor to get to do some scenes with him. He’s just so wonderful.”
Aniston, who is also an EP, said going forward, she is interested to see how her character Alex Levy will navigate the company merger she incited last season.
“It’s watching this big move that Alex made at the end of Season 3 and how’s that working out for you? That position and that huge merge happening, and to see how gracefully that she walks through that.”
Witherspoon confessed she is “kind of a nerd” and was also very interested to see how the merger turns out, but also that real-life current events will influence the show just as they have in previous seasons.
“The thing I like about our show is that they pivot based on what they see happening in the world,” she said, so there is already so much to address in the time span when we start again. But there will be so much more. I mean it’s an ever-evolving media landscape.”
Asked if she’d heard Showrunner Charlotte Stoudt’s comments to Deadline last month about examining Alex and Chip (Mark Duplass)’s backstory next season, Aniston said, “It would be interesting to see the origin story of that. Yes, I think that’s one of the things we might’ve heard.”
For Karen Pittman, the evolution of her character Mia Jordan bodes well for a compelling future too.
“It was really important to open the aperture of who Mia Jordan is,” Pittman said. “We had seen her for two seasons in work mode as we’ve seen a lot of the women on the show, but there was a deeper emotional landscape to who Mia Jordan is, and I really wanted to explore that… So seeing Mia laugh and dance and dress and hop in the bed with a guy was all part of that.”
Pittman also credited the writers and showrunner Stoudt for their handling of what Mia went through in reporting on the murder of George Floyd last season.
“Mia, as an African American female executive producer, has to watch the George Floyd murder and has to talk about it with Andre Ford [her boyfriend],” Pittman said. “And along with all the things that happened on The Morning Show, I really believed that that murder during the pandemic may have been the most newsworthy event outside of the pandemic. I really felt like there’s something to explore in sharing that moment with our audience—what a news person authentically would go through after having to view something like that over and over and over again.”
However, as Ellenberg said “it’s too early” for Season 4 solid facts just yet.
He added, “The best thing about working on the show is when you watch it, even the dailies, but particularly when you start watching the cuts and you’re working on them, even in the rough stage, you always become the audience almost every single time and you’re like, ‘Wait, really? That’s what happened?’”