‘The Morning Show’ Season 3 Finale: EP Charlotte Stoudt on the ‘Competency Porn’ of Good Journalism and How Long the ‘Balls Out’ Show Could Last
SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from the Season 3 finale of “The Morning Show.”
Another outing of the sometimes hilarious, sometimes devastating, always thrilling “The Morning Show” has come to pass.
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Season 3 finale “The Overview Effect” sees Alex (Jennifer Aniston) realize who and what was important to her. Bradley’s abrupt on-air resignation from UBA, timed to a new article about Cory (Billy Crudup) allegedly grooming her, shakes Alex to her core, and that’s before Paul (Jon Hamm) tells her about Bradley’s cover-up of Hal’s (Joe Tippett) involvement with the Jan. 6 insurrection. But when she goes to Bradley’s apartment to confront her, the conversation only makes her realize that Paul may not be who he seems.
At first, Alex thinks Bradley is crazy for insinuating that Paul may have been surveilling Bradley’s private communications. But she sends Bradley a text that incorrectly mentions Bradley being from Hanover, N.H. — she’s from West Virginia — and when Paul flippantly remarks to Alex that Bradley should “go back to Hanover” later that night, she realizes the truth.
So she blows up the deal. With the help of Laura (Julianna Margulies), Alex drafts a plan overnight that proposes UBA merge with rival network NBN instead of being acquired by Paul’s company, Hyperion. The move blindsides Paul, and obviously ends their romance. As she tells him, the fact that he would silence a journalist for investigating wrongdoing at Hyperion is too much for her to see him as a real partner. Heartbroken, but with her head held high, she prepares to rebuild UBA — right after she drops Bradley off to turn herself in to the F.B.I.
Variety spoke to showrunner Charlotte Stoudt, who took over this season from Kerry Ehrin, about the ever-higher stakes of “The Morning Show” and what Season 4 might look like.
Were you watching “The Morning Show” before it became a potential project for you? What impressions did you have of it?
I did watch it. I remember vividly a scene early on where Alex is in this blood-red outfit, and she goes and confronts the board. She calls them all bozos, and that she’s America. It’s like, “Wow, this lady is fascinating!” I just loved the balls-out quality that it had. I also loved that not only did it look at sexual misconduct in the workplace, but also how women can be complicit in that system. I thought was very brave, and not like something I’d seen before. And that really interested me.
What made you want to sign on? How has this felt different from other shows in your career, like “Pieces of Her” and “Homeland”?
If I’m afraid of something, I tend to sign up. “I have no idea how to do this. I guess that means I should do it!” And for every writer, a huge question is: What kind of scenes am I writing? What I liked about this show is that it’s roomy. You know you can have some jokes, some banter. That’s a little more difficult to do on a thriller. And the other thing I really liked was what we tend to call, on the show, like the “tonal slide.” You come into a scene very dramatic — and then it becomes absurd. Or around the other way around: a light, comic scene suddenly takes this sharp turn and becomes deadly serious.
And it’s really fun to write the interviews, having six or seven-page scenes that are pretty long for television.
Earlier this season, Mimi Leder told me that while she doesn’t agree with people who think of the show as camp, she still embraces the extreme highs and lows that make viewers see it that way. What do you make of that discourse?
Everybody has a right to their opinion. I have two thoughts about that. One: I feel like the world we’re living in is pretty extreme. Since Trump came on the scene, since the pandemic, we’ve really been living these crazy high and lows and uncertainty. How long is the pandemic gonna go on? Is there gonna be a vaccine? Who won the election? These crazy, live wire, big questions that affect a country or world. Your job as a writer is always to be like, “What is it to be alive today?” I might tell it through running a restaurant, like “The Bear,” or through a media company, like “The Morning Show,” but I think we’re all after the same thing: What is that particular emotional texture of being alive?
And even more is that, even if it does seem extreme, I always want it to be emotionally grounded. Like you understand why someone is doing or feeling what they are. That is key, so when the actor does the scene, they feel that it’s authentic. I want to feel what they’re feeling. If it’s too outsized, as a viewer, I’m out. And I never want this audience to feel that.
The tonal slide you’re talking about is really apparent in Chip’s (Mark Duplass) appearance on “TMS” in the finale. It’s played for laughs — he drops constant F-bombs, and makes mention of the $10,000 FCC fine they’ll cause — but his monologue also helps wisen people up to Paul’s scheme to buy UBA and sell off its assets. How and why did you write it that way?
Chip hates Paul for all sorts of reasons on a personal level. But he did give 20 years of his life to that place. He and Alex have been together for such a long time. It comes from very personal place: “You’re taking the thing that has meant everything to me, Paul!” So in that sense, I feel like it is really grounded and emotional.
But I actually asked our consultant, Brian Stelter, who wrote “Top of the Morning,” which is the inspiration for the show. I was like, “Walk me through what it takes to get a story. From the first time there’s a little blip on the radar that there’s a hostage situation or whatever, all the way through to how it gets on the prompters for people to say it in the teacup.” When he wrote out all the steps, there’s like 30! I was like, “People should know this!” I was kind of moved by the competency porn of it. We’re in a world where either people hate experts, or everyone is an expert. I was like, “No, actually, these are experienced people, actually good at their jobs!” And I wanted to celebrate that, so that’s weirdly where the monologue came from. It was actually twice as long when we shot it.
And at the end, Chip needed his personal moment. He just can’t stop himself. As opposed to thinking, “I need something funny,” it was more like, “What is at the core of this person right now?” His wound that Paul has taken his work wife, Alex, and he’s taken his history. He’s erasing who Chip is. So Chip has to go below the belt.
When did you realize the Jan. 6 insurrection would be the linchpin for Bradley’s arc this season?
Early on, there was the thought of, if Bradley’s the truth teller, what happens if Bradley gets a little high on the UBA drug? Her incredible platform, and her salary. What if she steps over the line in some way? She’s obviously the character who most straddles the divide of the country in terms of her background, and now being in what some people would call the you know the coastal elite. So how does this person put those two sides of herself together, and what’s the crucible where we could see that? It’s sitting right there with Jan. 6. I was actually worried it might be too on-the-nose, but what helps that story was that it was very, very personal. It wasn’t about politics. It was really about what happens when you and someone else are across this divide in the country. There was a story about a teenage son whose father was an insurrectionist, and he recorded his father on the phone and shared it with the FBI. These resources it would take to have the courage to take your father down, it’s really intense. And that made me think of Bradley turning in her dad when she was just a kid.
There was one other piece I wanted to fit in, which was that Cory says “I love you” to Bradley at the end of Season 2. I thought it seemed like a more interesting way to go that, if they shared a secret together this season, it wouldn’t be a romantic or sexual one. It would be one about trust, vulnerability and something that would affect the network. There was a lot of tension in the fact that they held this secret together, but it wasn’t as simple as a love triangle. It dug deeper: Can I trust you with my life? Can I trust you with this institution? The stakes seemed higher that way to me.
The more interesting romance happens between Alex and Paul. As Cory says, referencing Alex’s tryst with Mitch in the past, she has the worst taste in men. What were you trying to say by continuing that pattern and writing this romance, and then by breaking it up?
There are a couple of things going on. Coming out of the pandemic, she has a new vulnerability because she went through a life a near-death experience. So I think she maybe didn’t understand how lonely she was, and Paul awakens that in her. Obviously, Paul steps over the line and does something that she can’t forgive him for, but I always saw Paul as somebody that oddly taught her how to take him down. Paul does say to her, “I like that you’re strong. I like that you don’t just try to flatter me. I like that you’re a person who’s really interested in your own power.” And I don’t think anyone’s ever said that to her. Men don’t say that. She had to laugh at Mitch’s gross jokes, and everybody else has been like “Alex, stay in your box,” except for Bradley. Everyone else is in a way trying to manage her. Paul is one of the first people who initially doesn’t try to manage her, which is exciting to her. Initially, she thinks, “I can’t change UBA on my own. Maybe I need this person who is a maverick, and a guy with a lot of swagger.”
In a weird way, what she learns from him is: “Oh, I actually can do it myself.” She needed to meet Paul in order to save UBA from Paul. He’s a completely self-made person, and that’s always the attraction of these billionaires. “Wow, they write their own rules!” And I think Alex took a little bit of that from him without taking the more toxic parts of him.
The moral clarity Alex gains in her break from Paul allows her to forgive Bradley for covering up Hal’s involvement in the insurrection. What about Laura? Is there room for forgiveness there as you enter Season 4?
What was fun this year was giving Laura more colors and complexity. Julianna is a tremendous actress, and I wanted to see her get messy, nasty, ugly, hurt, vindictive, shattered. I wanted to turn up the temperature on that character. Laura is very cool, calm and collected. She is often the adult in the room — In Season 2, I kept thinking, “Listen to that lady! She knows the right thing to do!” So I was like, “Okay, what if that lady’s getting it wrong? What if that lady stumbles or misjudges?” There’s a kind of pathos to Laura, this loneliness to her. She went through something really difficult. A lot of people forget, when Ellen came out on her show, it was so controversial. We’ve forgotten that, but it was so difficult for someone to do that. And Laura went through that phase of homophobia, and you get the sense her family doesn’t accept her. So I wanted to find her vulnerability more.
We’re very, very, very early in the room [for Season 4], but I think I’d want to explore that more. Her dimensionality. Not just, “I’m Laura and I love Bradley, and she occasionally drives me crazy!” I think there’s there’s more to Laura than that.
How much longer do you see the show going? Do you do one last outing, now that Alex has actually made a move big enough to change UBA, or does it last longer than that?
The show deals with contemporary events, and obviously — news is gonna keep happening. The DNA of the show allows for a certain amount of longevity. But as I always say, don’t ask me about Everest. I’m just working on Kilimanjaro. Because it’s a pretty steep climb to try to get this show to the finale.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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