#‘The Morning Show’ Season 2 is Being Rewritten to Factor in the Pandemic

AppleTV made headlines when it cast Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carell in its original series The Morning Show. It continued to draw attention all throughout its first season, whether it was for the inclusion of a #MeToo subplot or how critics seemed to slowly rally around the show as it raced toward its finale.

Filming on The Morning Show season 2 was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, and in a new interview, Emmy nominee Mark Duplass says that the second season is being rewritten to factor the ongoing global pandemic into the storyline. 

Speaking with Deadline after he received his Emmy nomination this morning, actor Mark Duplass explained that the show is being reworked – again. “We shot two episodes before we shut down due to the pandemic, but I know that they’re also rewriting, which is crazy because that’s what happened in the first season,” he said. “They had a whole set of scripts [then] and they rewrote everything to include the #MeToo movement, and now we’ve got other, larger, global phenomenon to deal with. I don’t know what they’re doing but I know they’re rewriting.”

Spoilers for The Morning Show season 1 ahead.

Considering how closely the show stuck to our actual reality in its first season – with the #MeToo angle, and especially with incorporating the Pulse nightclub shooting into its story – it makes sense that the writers wouldn’t want to ignore such a world-altering news story on a show that’s ostensibly about delivering the news.

The big question now is: at what point will the pandemic enter the season 2 storyline, and how will the show’s characters react to it? Will the show have to adapt to anchors doing the news on Zoom from their homes? How will that affect the rivalries and relationships in the newsroom? As in real life, this is a hugely significant event that has ripple effects on practically every aspect of human existence, and I’m curious about what kinds of stories they were planning to tell before this hit and how things might have changed during the rewrite process. Will certain subplots be scrapped or delayed until future (hopefully) pandemic-free seasons? Introducing the coronavirus into a prestige drama is sort of opening a narrative Pandora’s box, and I’ll be curious to see if the writers ultimately end up regretting that decision or if this is something that will take them to a creative destination they never would have reached otherwise.

There’s no word yet on when the second season will resume production, but you can catch up with season one on AppleTV right now.

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