‘The Morning Show’ Kept Challenging Itself to Get Bigger and Better in Season 3 — Even Going to Space

From navigating the Capitol Riot to exploring rocket science with a creepy billionaire, “The Morning Show” Season 3 left it all on the UBA broadcast stage for Apple TV+ viewers. 

The same doggedness that Alex (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley (Reese Witherspoon) bring to their reporting can be seen throughout the sensational plot of creator Jay Carson’s unafraid modern drama, which ripped more stories from the headlines this season than ever before. It’s also reflected in the stylish and emotional series’ cinematography, editing, costumes, and production design as rendered by artisans who continue to evolve their work along with the characters and plotlines.  

“We’re telling so many separate stories, but they still feel like one story: the story of UBA and our characters together,” editor Carole Kravetz Aykanian, who worked on Episodes 1, 5, and 10 for Season 3, told IndieWire. “That’s one of the things that I’m very proud of in the episodes I’ve cut, because that’s a little complicated to achieve and pretty invisible too. When it works, you don’t even think about it.” 

Appearing on a virtual crafts panel, Kravetz Aykanian was joined by production designer Nelson Coates, cinematographer Tami Reiker, and costume designers Sophie De Rakoff and Beth Lancaster. “The Morning Show” has long tackled real-world events like the COVID-19 pandemic but this season had a new twist: Space. 

“They threw in my lap that we were going to space!” Coates said, describing a fun and rigorous production design process for Episode 1 that involved not only building a launch tower and achieving a zero gravity effect but also required an entire Elon Musk-like tech company to back up those illusions. “That is a huge, huge undertaking, especially on a show that is not a sci-fi show.’ [My challenge was] finding that balance that wasn’t taking us into sci-fi, but looked like something that would be very plausible and believable — that [Jon Hamm’s billionaire character] has the latest and greatest technology, but also that it’s not fantastical.” 

As a cinematographer, Reiker faced her own unique challenges recreating real events alongside more theatrical storylines. In Episode 5, Witherspoon’s character is seen in the middle of the January 6 insurrection. Shooting at City Hall in Los Angeles (Coates notes that much of the show isn’t shot where you think it is), “The Morning Show” had to work like a “well-oiled machine” to overcome time constraints while conveying the gravity of the moment, per Reiker. That energy came through in her camera choices. 

“When Reese is wandering through the Capitol, that’s where we chose to have all three cameras handheld and to have more of a gritty feel and to be following her,” Reiker said. “But then for [Episode 9], director [Stacie Passon] and I decided it would be more like a Michael Mann film. There was so much more tension there and so much action and everyone’s racing through the office. So we used very long lenses and dollies and tracked them and kept moving and following them. We wanted to keep the chase going the whole time.” (Reiker also shot on Episodes 3 and 7.)

That fluctuation in tone works for “The Morning Show” in large part because of its creative team’s overall commitment to character development. That’s particularly apparent in the costumes. As department head, De Rakoff described her designers’ meticulous consideration of the actors they were dressing and the characters the partnered artists were creating together. 

“For example, we came up with a whole backstory for Stella,” De Rakoff said of the fearless UBA producer played by Greta Lee. “We knew that she came from tech, we knew that she came from Stanford, but for us, she was like this underground club girl that had this whole other life that she started to live on the West Coast and then brought with her to the East Coast. That informed Stella’s look in the way specifically that she wears the sneakers. There’s a lot of more avant-garde designers and a street style to her that you would not necessarily associate with someone who’s in that job position.” 

“We also put a little bit of ourselves into the costuming, thinking through how it is that we might react to a certain situation and tapping into that empathy,” Lancaster said, echoing De Rakoff’s sentiments. She went on to explain the multidimensional considerations surrounding these characters that make the uber-contemporary, spectacle-laden show cohesive. 

“It’s about learning to ask the questions behind the questions and learning to see the story behind the story,” Lancaster said of what she’s learned going from assistant costume designer to costume designer on “The Morning Show.” She continued, “Thinking about who these people are in their private lives versus their public lives is very important, since there is that sense of in-front-of-the-curtain, behind-the-curtain with so many of our folks.” 

Watch the complete panel in the video above. “The Morning Show” Season 3 is now streaming on Apple TV+. 

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