Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Morning Show” Season 4, Episode 10.
“The Morning Show” dropped many curveballs with its Season 4 finale, leaving plenty of fallout to explore upon the Apple drama’s return.
Episode 10, titled “Knowing Violation,” followed as Alex’s (Jennifer Aniston) efforts to rescue Bradley (Reese Witherspoon) from a Belarus gulag reached new levels of tension. After Alex’s failed negotiations with a Russian oligarch in the previous episode, the finale picked up more than a month into Bradley’s imprisonment, with the crew hoping that making a break in the Wolf River investigation would push the State Department to secure her release.
But the road to justice led to the unthinkable for Alex, after she was forced to resign from UBN upon learning her colleague and acting CEO Celine Dumont (Marion Cotillard) was behind a scandal from the start of the season, as well as being at the center of the coverup that got Bradley detained.
“What attracted me to the show in the beginning is that these characters are very resilient, they’re very tough people,” showrunner Charlotte Stoudt told TheWrap of how the characters navigate the finale’s many twists. “They’re really like weevils, you knock them down and they just pop right back up. It takes a lot to really get their attention or stop them in their tracks.”
For Bradley, that meant facing the ultimate challenge for a journalist: Facing more than a month of torture as Belarus officials attempted to pressure her into selling out a source she was set to get answers from about the Wolf River coverup — in which Celine’s family manipulated numbers in an EPA study to hide how one of their companies was causing people to get sick.
The scenes played out in Episode 10, featuring Bradley in solitary confinement and being deprived of sleep with loud rock music and fluorescent lighting. Despite the psychological warfare, Bradley did not give up the name of her source. Stoudt said the storyline was inspired by real-life events, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who spent more than a year detained in Russia on espionage charges that were long considered to be false, as well as WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was held for months in 2022 on a marijuana charge.
Stoudt also pointed out that Bradley going to Belarus was a way of punishing herself after coming off the Jan. 6 scandal mostly unscathed back in Season 3.
“She knew how dangerous it was [to go to Belarus,] and I think she went there on purpose to say, ‘Fate, if you need to judge me, you will,’” she said. As for the torture scenes, Stoudt added, “It’s more about [showing] what is the toll it’s going to take on her. That was the goal of those scenes, as opposed to just kind of a torture porn thing.”
Back in the states, Celine forced Alex to resign after threatening her with leaking her attempt to negotiate Bradley’s release with the Russian oligarch who had been previously sanctioned — a serious crime that could bring her, UBN and tech magnate Paul Marks (Jon Hamm) down for his part in arranging the secret meeting. That led Alex to say a heartbreaking, and dishonest, goodbye to the TMS team on the air before retreating to her penthouse.
That defeat did not last long, though. Following advice from her father Martin (Jeremy Irons), Alex hosted a press conference in which she shared her plans to sue Celine and UBN for wrongful termination — a ballsy move that got the news division to turn on their acting CEO. But it was Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) who facilitated the fatal blow to Celine’s career, after he called his then-lover and got her to admit her role in Bradley’s imprisonment while on speakerphone at the press conference.
Cory had found solace in Celine following his mother’s death, but a conversation with Miles (Aaron Pierre) made Cory realize he had been Celine’s scapegoat for years. Miles revealed that Celine and Cory’s mother Martha (Lindsay Duncan) worked together to broker the deal to cover up the Wolf River findings, in exchange for Cory to be hired as head of news for UBA all the way back at the start of Season 1. After his mother left him a copy of the original file after she ended her own life, Cory used the evidence to take Celine down and help bring Bradley back.
“Somebody in the writers’ room said to me that the story of Cory in ‘The Morning Show’ is the birth of a soul,” Stoudt said, noting how every character struggles with ambition vs. humanity on the show. “He’s somebody who is so good at tap dancing in and out of situations that you’re interested in seeing what actually could stop him and change him.”
“He’s really shaken by all of this, which is why it takes him a minute to do the right thing,” she added.
The scandal successfully took Celine off the board, and we last see her saying goodbye to Miles via letter as she headed back to Europe to face her billionaire father. Though she knew she’d be “fed to the wolves” and take the fall for Wolf River and the mess at UBN, Stoudt said not to fully count her out — “If a character isn’t dead, they still exist in the TMS universe.”
The events also thawed the ice between Alex and Paul, signaling a potential rekindling of their romance in the future. And UBN is now searching for new leadership as both Alex, Celine and Stella (Greta Lee) ended up out the door before the end of the season. But most importantly, the finale ended with Alex and Bradley reuniting at the Minsk airport, as both face uncertain futures ahead given one is out of a job after more than 20 years at UBN and the other grapples with the aftermath of the trauma she’s just been through — and the big story she brought to light in the process.
And if that wasn’t enough, “The Morning Show” also faces the difficult task of catching up to the Trump 2.0 era in the already-ordered Season 5. Given the show is set against the backdrop of the American media and political climate, that means potentially tackling the president’s recent attacks on media organizations, the rise of independent journalism and other big themes impacting the sector today.
“What is important is that the show is fundamentally about hope and resilience,” Stoudt concluded. “Wherever we go and however many minefields we try to step on this season, the fundamental tone has to be of hope, because I need that. I want to feel like there’s a way out of this and maybe we can try to reclaim just a little bit of humanity … that’s really what gets lost in all this intense polarization.”
“The Morning Show” Seasons 1-4 are now streaming on Apple TV. The show has already been renewed for Season 5.
