Producers of Apple TV+’s drama-satire series "The Morning Show" confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday that its upcoming season will not focus on the 2024 presidential election, despite being set in that year.
The Emmy-winning series, starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, follows characters behind a fictional broadcast morning news program and was inspired by CNN correspondent Brian Stelter’s 2013 book "Top of the Morning."
Despite its fictionalized characters, "The Morning Show" has tackled several real-world political topics, such as the #MeToo movement, the coronavirus pandemic and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
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However, its fourth season, set to premiere Sept. 17, will largely avoid what is arguably the most political event of all: the 2024 presidential election and President Donald Trump’s re-election.
"We did not touch the election — this season ends right before the election," director and executive producer Mimi Leder told The Hollywood Reporter. "Our show is not about elections; our show is about the world, about AI, about deepfakes, about environmental tragedies. It’s about democracy. It’s about journalists in jeopardy, journalists under threat, and our main theme this season is trust — who can you trust?"
Though the show won’t cover the election, showrunner Charlotte Stoudt said Trump and then-President Joe Biden will be referenced as a commentary on "two older White men" running for office.
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"We try to go at it sideways. We don’t really have, directly, an election story, but we do touch on the idea of: Why were two older White men running for president. Why do we still need daddy?" Stoudt joked.
One of the show’s co-stars, Nestor Carbonell, also described the upcoming season as having less emphasis on the "political" angle and more focus on the "social implications" of things.
"There are politics, but they’re politics within the station, less so on the political election," Carbonell said.
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, entertainment insiders warned that people would "generally become more self-censoring and less capable of critiquing the current political moment, if not less influential overall."
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Some attributed this to fear of criticizing Trump, while others cited audiences’ "preemptive exhaustion" with rhetorical storytelling.
"We’ve been seeing the departure of executives at the studios that had been hired to promote DEI in film and TV. Hollywood had swung too far left over the past few years and there was bound to be a reckoning," a blockbuster producer told Vulture in January.