You know that ping sound you hear all the time at the beginning of a movie or TV show trailer? That single, austere piano note that indicates something very serious is going on? That’s the very first thing you hear in the first official trailer for the second season of The Morning Show, so you know it’s going to be wild.
The new season of AppleTV+’s original series about the sordid goings-on behind the scenes of a popular network morning show seems to pick up right where it left off, with that jaw-dropping cliffhanger. The show within the show has just been abruptly cut from the air after co-anchors Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) exposed the culture of sexual misconduct at UBA, the fictional network that airs their show. Naturally, Season 2 will deal with the fallout.
Here’s what we know from the trailer: Despite Bradley’s insistence that they stick together in the wake of their bombshell, Alex is out at The Morning Show. UBA exec Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) is bent on getting her back, but with newly blonde Bradley taking the stage with Hasan Minhaj’s Eric Nomani, that may not be in the cards. It also looks like Alex is in for a grilling from UBA news anchor Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies). And of course, it looks like the show is still trying to thread the impossible needle of making Steve Carell’s sexually abusive Mitch Kessler sympathetic somehow.
With shots of New York’s empty streets and people in masks, it also looks like the new season will address the pandemic. Just as The Morning Show’s first season was upended by the #MeToo movement, forcing its creators to rethink the story they were going to tell in the wake of accusations of sexual assault against Today Show anchor Matt Lauer, Season 2 was put on hold due to the COVID-19 restrictions last year. It’ll be interesting to see how the soapy series handles that. The new season premieres on September 17.
