Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Morning Show” Season 4.
“The Morning Show” is back with another rollercoaster ride down the world of American media, but that won’t include the 2024 Election.
The Apple TV+ drama, which kicked off Season 4 Wednesday, picks up the drama in April 2024, two years after the fictional network UBA, which houses the titular morning news program at the show’s center, merged with a rival network to create a broadcast media empire. After a difficult period of transition that involved layoffs, company leadership secured the rights to the Olympics, which they consider the start of a fruitful new era.
“We wanted to give them enough runway to run into a lot of problems right before the Olympics started,” showrunner Charlotte Stoudt told TheWrap of Season 4. “That’s their holy grail. They just want to get to that opening ceremony.”
The timing also puts “The Morning Show” months before the events leading up to Donald Trump’s election, and the start of a tumultuous time that is already reshaping the media landscape in which the show is set.
Stoudt credited the decision partially to the show’s production schedule, which put the writers’ room well before the Election cycle had picked up in the latter half of the year.
“But we weren’t really going to directly play an Election story,” she said. “The show takes place in a reality where the presidential candidates are the real candidates, so that’s not really a story we can tell.”
The politics of the moment still influenced the themes the writers explored in Season 4, however, which include introducing Alex Levy’s (Jennifer Aniston) father Martin (Jeremy Irons) to delve into the TV journalist’s psyche.
“When we sat down to begin the writers’ room, the matchup was a rewatch of these two older guys and we asked ourselves, ‘Why do we still need daddy?’ ” Stoudt said, referring to the Trump-Biden rematch in the early Election year months. “Can’t we move past this need for a parental figure? That led us to think about parenting and how parents play such a big role, even in [our characters’] personal stories this year … They still loom almost mythically in our minds.”
“The Morning Show” Season 4 releases new episodes Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
