Spoilers follow for “The Overview Effect,†the season-three finale of The Morning Show.
Few shows today attempt to cover as much distance, in terms of plot, tone, and literal altitude, as The Morning Show. Apple TV+’s flagship series about the backstage drama at fictional legacy TV corporation UBA has always taken a go-for-broke approach to its storytelling, kicking off its first season with a Me Too investigation and setting its second in the months before the COVID pandemic. But the third has achieved a sort of plot escape velocity, covering a potential big-tech merger, a Sony-style hack, the January 6 insurrection — and literally sending some characters into low-Earth orbit.
The season ends with UBA anchors Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) teaming up to stop a potential acquisition by Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), a tech billionaire who romanced Alex while hiding flaws in his rocket program from the public and plotting to sell UBA for parts. Meanwhile, Bradley had been hiding a secret of her own, having deleted footage of her brother fighting a cop during the insurrection. After a dramatic fight with her sometimes-girlfriend Laura (Julianna Margulies) and defending her boss Cory (Billy Crudup) from false harassment accusations, Bradley decides to turn herself in and submit to an investigation. Also, Chip (Mark Duplass) has a dramatic meltdown on air and Stella (Greta Lee) helps Bradley and company dig up dirt on Paul. All these stories collide in a big dramatic finale with Alex denouncing Paul and legacy media living to fight another day as UBA merges with a rival network. To explain it all, Vulture caught up with Charlotte Stoudt, a writing veteran of thrillers like Pieces of Her and Homeland (as well as Fosse/Verdon), who took over The Morning Show as showrunner this season and told Vulture she wanted to capture the particular mania of trying to process the news at this moment in history.
At the end of the finale, Bradley Jackson turns herself in to the FBI. Is this the last we’ll see of her?
Oh, I think there might be another life for her. To be less glib, I should say that puts Bradley in an interesting place professionally and emotionally.
How did you land on the idea for the plotline that her brother would be involved in the January 6 insurrection?
I was always struck by the human level of the insurrection. When I heard about the story of the teenager who turned his father in, it did remind me of Bradley turning her father in. To me, it was interesting to take a grounded approach to January 6, to focus on what it does to families, instead of the top-down political machinery as a result of that event. It felt interesting to put someone who is a truth teller in that position, both in terms of whether she’d cover for Hal — unlike what she did for her dad — and because the evening news chair is open and just within reach for her. One of the themes for this season was that we’re living in a world with the erosion of truth, where two people can watch the same video and have completely different responses. The person who embodies that split most to me is Bradley.
You came into The Morning Show mid-stream, taking over from Kerry Ehrin after two seasons. Were you pitching Apple a specific direction for the show when you were hired?
Everyone was so generous. Kerry, who created these incredibly memorable characters, said, “It’s yours, do what you want.†And everybody was pretty much like, “What do you want to do?†Because of my background in thrillers, I wanted a season with a fair amount of propulsion. Also, I wanted to somehow capture the feeling of what it was like to be alive while making that show. People felt so raw and things were so extreme, and I wanted to capture that heightened, frenetic energy. We were one of the first rooms back in person, in late 2021, with the bulk of the writing in the winter and spring of 2022. Everybody had been doing Zoom rooms and it was a shock to sit next to a stranger and be intimate about a story.
You have Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston leading and producing this show, and I imagine they might have their own ideas about where to take these characters. What are those conversations with them like?
Early in the process for season three, I spoke with them about their emotional arcs and what was important to them coming out of season two. They know their characters better than I do, and I love actors because they think a little differently than I do. I’m always happy to hear an idea that wouldn’t have occurred to me. And for that season, there was going to be a love story, so that was a consideration — who are the scene partners?
The season starts by literally launching Bradley into space in a Blue Origin–style expedition with Jon Hamm’s tech billionaire Paul Marks. How did you land on that being the inciting incident?
It started with emotion. As people coming back into that room, we were unmoored, we were kind of floating and didn’t have gravity. It was like, Is COVID going to be over? Is there going to be real change with law enforcement? That sense of hovering gave me the image of people floating without gravity, and I had an early image of Bradley and Cory just floating. Then I was like, Oh, Michael Strahan went up in the Blue Origin rocket, what if we did that too? It was a crazy idea! I wrote it without thinking about how it was going to be fairly challenging to film.
How did you end up casting Jon Hamm?
He was the front-runner all along. I wanted someone that was Alex’s equal and a person who would be interested in being with an equal. I also wanted someone who could out-Cory Cory. In a weird way, that situation is almost a triangle with those three playing off each other. We also knew that the Roe v. Wade decision was going to come down from the Supreme Court sometime in the spring or summer, so we were thinking a lot about minority rule and billionaires becoming their own nation-states.
As actors, Jon and Jennifer have great chemistry, but for the characters, it’s such a crossing of the line for Alex to sleep with Paul. What did you want to get out of that story line?
Of course, I wanted to give her that impossible decision at the end, but I also wanted to see a different side of Alex. I felt it was important that they actually did consummate that attraction because Alex has had a really bad run! She was in a marriage, but it was sort of for show, and the Mitch thing was hardly a great love affair. I was like, This lady needs some intimacy. Her daughter is not around. She needs to be close to someone, as any human does. The thing about Paul that was great is that when she blew him off on the rocket, he was mad, but he got over it. They’re playing at the same level. It’s not like he’s trying to manage her; it’s comfort with her power. To everybody else she’s just talent. What if somebody said, “You’re amazing, do what you want� That’s why she takes his offer seriously.
You also gave Paul a past with Stella, who was introduced in season two as a different kind of tech emissary. She’s supposed to be young and hip in the vein of disruptive digital media, whereas he’s more interested in buying it all for his own purposes.
In season four, we really want to look at where Stella belongs. She left tech for very specific reasons, but it’s still in her bones, that sense of being a creator and not just a manager. She originally created that tech for a very progressive, quite leftist reason. What happens when you get pulled into a more centrist corporation?
How did you end up casting Tig Notaro as Paul’s enforcer, Amanda?
My God, I love Tig so much. I thought of the idea and then it turned out that she and Jon are very, very good friends and have known each other forever, so that was a bonus. I liked a tough woman totally unsentimental and unapologetically telling him shit. He has no family, so in a way, she’s his family. And then Alex kind of puts an elbow in between them, and Amanda is like, “This isn’t going to happen.†I could do a whole season of just Amanda! I’d be typing away happily.
It’s interesting to watch a show made by Apple, a big tech corporation, end a season with legacy media essentially teaming up against tech. Did you think about that tension while making it?
I’m not just saying this: Apple’s been so supportive. They weren’t like, “Don’t talk about tech.†They never said anything about how tech should or should not be portrayed. Paul Marks is not all of tech. He’s not Elon Musk. I thought of him as a character who exists in this show’s world because he’s very ambitious, he’s messy, he’s flawed, and he oversteps like everyone else.
You have an episode built around Cybil’s racist email coming out in a hack and all the ways the characters at UBA maneuver around it. How did you decide to approach a racism reckoning in an institution in that way with Cory leaking the email in order to force her out?
We knew any secret could come out of the hack, but I wanted to make sure the hack secrets didn’t feel episodic, like we’re learning one thing each episode. I wanted to make sure there was one most important thing to come out of the hack, and we also wanted to do something about institutional racism and pay disparities. That felt interesting, knowing that a lot of times in the world the very wealthy aren’t that concerned about things going on on the ground. In trying to oust Cybil, Cory thinks the ends justifies the means because he thinks Cybil is blocking UBA’s survival. But is he right? And what happens when Chris someday learns that Cory did that?
Chris is a character you introduced this season. What did you want to explore with her?
I had recently seen Nicole Beharie in Scenes From a Marriage and was reminded of how amazing she is and how she’s so specific as an actor. I’d also been fascinated by Simone Biles choosing to pull out of the Olympics, that idea that she didn’t know where her body was in space. Chris is someone who is extraordinary on a track and winning was clear, but when she comes into this very messy nest of vipers, she has to learn what winning means here and whether she even wants it. If I’m not leaning on my athlete’s identity, who am I? There’s so much to unpack with her, and I’m very excited to go deeper into that character.
Bradley, by the end of the season, has a dramatic break with Laura after she discovers Bradley has been keeping secrets about Hal. Do we imagine Laura will still be around this world going forward?
Because of the strikes, I would say that’s TBD, but I love Laura. There’s more to do with Laura, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of who she is and her own emotional journey. There are stories, even apart from Bradley, to tell with her. Laura was such a composed adult person when I watched season two. I was like, That lady’s the only person making sense here. Just do what she says! And I wanted to shake up that composure and see if we could put her in situations where she’d be pushed to the limit. Then, with the Cory-Bradley of it, I think they tentatively … took a step. They both have a lot of reckoning to do with their choices on their own.
Did you always have the season structured so that you’d have a pandemic flashback episode? How did you decide to bring Bradley’s coverage of January 6 into that episode?
With the character of Bradley sort of gravitating toward January 6, the notion of their secret formed itself pretty early. I was interested in Bradley and Cory having a secret that was not romantic and not sexual, more about vulnerability and trust — that she would know on some level, cruel as it was, that if she told him this, he would help her. The ask is very painful for both of them. Early, early on we decided we would do a “My Pandemic†episode. It was not going to be about COVID but all these relationships. The writer of that episode, Zander Lehmann, actually met his wife during the pandemic, so I was like, “You’re the one to write this.†That episode was also where we had the idea of wanting to see Mia in a completely different light, to show her at home and explain why she is sleeping at the office.
Because Alex is so involved with Paul Marks and Bradley is involved in that insurrection plot, I realized that, watching the finale, the two characters are pretty separate for most of the season. Was that intentional?
It wasn’t intentional because I love all their scenes together. I love that scene in episode two where Alex says, “Did you fuck a predator?†and Bradley is like, “Well, I protected you even if he didn’t.†I like that kind of no-holds-barred friendship, the person who can really tell you the truth. You’re picking up on something that we feel as well, which is that they should have more interaction going forward. We want to get them together more in season four.
Once you have the people of UBA rally together against the deal, you give Chip a whole Howard Beale–style on-air rant about how morning news works.
I asked our consultant Brian Stelter, who wrote Top of the Morning, to walk me through how a story gets all the way to the desk on air. The monologue was actually twice as long as what’s in the episode. It was like 35 steps to get something on air, and to me that was like competency porn. It’s a system of checks and balances pushing things forward. I’m not saying legacy media is perfect, but they do have a process and they are trying to get things right. I felt like someone should say that, and Chip seemed to be the right one. Chip hates Paul! Paul got him fired. He had to watch Alex and Paul making out. It’s not just out of the goodness of his heart.
Do you have a list of all the fake shows UBA produces? I very much enjoy updates about their hit Donner Party series.
I just inherited Donner Party, but I find it to be the most hilarious. I never get tired of Donner Party jokes. Sometimes you don’t see it, but our amazing production team has come up with posters for all these UBA shows to put up along the walls of our sets. It’s like a baking-dance-competition show and a detective-vampire show. It’s wonderful.
It feels like there was a little more humor in the dialogue of this season, a kind of Sorkin-style patter. I read an interview from before you wrote the season where you talked about wanting to lean into the humor more.
One thing I’ve always loved about The Morning Show was the tonal slide, as we call it. You can enter a scene that’s apparently dramatic and it can become absurd or vice versa. I think that’s emblematic of the time we’re living in. You get these newsfeed updates about wars and under that it’s Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend. It’s all context collapse. The tone of The Morning Show reflects how we’re getting information. It’s something Kerry Ehrin baked in. And jokes are fun — it’s great to try to write jokes, and luckily I had a lot of people on staff who are much funnier than me.
If the third season was informed by what you and the writers were feeling at the end of 2021 and early 2022, what are you feeling now that might inform the tone of the fourth season?
The show has a certain ruthless, cynical aspect to it, but this is ultimately a show where there has to be some hope. It’s always interesting to figure out what form that should take. This is a vague answer to your question, but it’s me thinking about, What is a way forward in a world that just seems to be repeating its mistakes? For Alex, there’s an urge to make UBA better once you have a lot more power, but how do you actually do that? Is it possible to really change an institution? When you’re swimming in the Hollywood pool, you’re always asking yourself that.