“To answer your question, I’m pretty tired.”
Mimi Leder executive-produces The Morning Show and directed many of its seminal—which is to say “wildest”—episodes. When we connect over Zoom, she’s just finished editing Season 3 of the currently airing Apple TV+ series, which stars Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon as TV anchors taking on the misogyny of the media industry, as well as just about every topical issue there has been to tackle in the last four years. (Hence the exhaustion.)
In the Season 3 episodes that have aired thus far alone, The Morning Show has addressed cyber-hacks, the war in Ukraine, revenge porn, the reign of Elon Musk, systemic racism, abortion laws, cancel culture, the collapse of news organizations, the difficulties of being a bisexual public figure, and the power dynamics of office romances. Oh, and it shot Reese Witherspoon into actual outer space.
Still, this is a unique series in which, when a fan says “The Morning Show just recreated the January 6 insurrection,” there is an equal impulse to say “what in the actual hell?” and “well, of course The Morning Show recreated the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
It’s rare for a television series to be this bonkers and also this ambitious—and, as we learned speaking with Leder, meticulous. The Morning Show taking on the storming of the Capitol is outrageous, but the outlandishness is also somewhat calming in its approach. Nailing that seemingly discordant dynamic is what The Morning Show does so well.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead for Season 3 of The Morning Show.)
“It’s a challenging show,” Leder tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed of working on the series. “There’s just so many storylines, and it’s such a character-driven show. Ultimately what’s really important is the authenticity of the storytelling.” She takes a breath and lets out a long sigh. “It just gets better and better… and more twisted.”
In Episode 5, “Love Island,” the show flashes back to winter 2020. The rewind is somewhat triggering for viewers: It’s the uncertain early days of COVID. Everyone is wearing masks and isolating. In the newsroom, plexiglass barriers are erected around everyone’s desks. No one stands closer than six feet apart. People’s family members aren’t following social distancing advice… and they are dying because of it.
Amid all of this, Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon) moves to the Montana ranch home of her new (and first) girlfriend, fellow news anchor Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies), so they can broadcast The Morning Show together each morning. Bradley’s mother dies of COVID complications, which sends her into an emotional spiral that leads to her breaking up with Laura in a fit of rage. Bradley then nabs a new assignment in Washington, D.C., where producers are anticipating unrest after Donald Trump is forced to leave office.
Friends, Bradley Jackson doesn’t just cover the Jan. 6 insurrection. She is inside the insurrection. Somehow, she gets inside the Capitol with the rioters and, using her iPhone, captures some of the most important, gripping footage of the violence—and, with it, the faces of the perpetrators. The grainy footage of the protesters breaching the police barricades, flooding the halls of the Capitol, sparring with cops, vandalizing government property, and, generally speaking, causing a deeply upsetting raucous: Bradley films it all, and The Morning Show shows it.
For a viewer, it’s distressing to see these events dramatized in a fictional TV show, one starring some of your favorite celebs. So imagine making it.
“When we were shooting Season 2, we were in COVID. Nobody had vaccines, and we were tested every day, eight times a week,” Leder says, about what it’s like to recreate these news events on the series. That experience was surreal as it was. So when it came to recreating that time period and staging the insurrection to boot, the production team just leaned into the disturbing unusualness.
The footage “inside the Capitol” was filmed at City Hall in Los Angeles. “We did a lot of research looking at all the footage,” Leder says. “It was crucial for us to make it look real. What did they wear? We didn’t want it to be a cartoon. We wanted it to feel extremely authentic and realistic, and I think we achieved that. We integrated it with some footage from the insurrection, but everything inside is us, what we created.”
This is The Morning Show, so even when dealing with something as high-stakes as the insurrection, there’s a soap opera-style twist. It turns out that one of the rioters that Bradley films assaulting a police officer is her brother, Hal (Joe Tippett). (The gasp I let out at that reveal could have been heard by Bradley during her space mission.) She is, understandably, horrified. She smuggles her brother out of the melee, finds him a bus ticket out of town, and deletes the footage of him from the file she sends to her producers to air—compromising her journalistic ethics.
Later, the FBI surveys the footage and notices that the man they’re trying to find who assaulted an officer, Bradley’s brother, is strangely unidentifiable, and the footage cuts around his face. To protect her brother, Bradley may have committed a crime in her own right. At the very least, she betrayed the principles of her profession—and obscured the truth.
“As a journalist, she makes the unthinkable, unforgivable mistake,” Leder says. “It's a great, big discovery, and an important one for the story. And it delves into our theme this season: What is the truth, and the lies we tell ourselves. The state of the truth. This was, I think, a really great way of [illustrating] that.”
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