Here's why The Morning Show decided to set its second season on the cusp of COVID

If you’ve had enough of COVID-centric entertainment but you love Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, we’ve got some bad news for you. The Morning Show, which premieres its second season this Friday, has placed its new stories squarely in the run-up to the global pandemic. There are other things going on, of course, including #MeToo politics, corporate intrigue, and blossoming romances, but it’s all punctuated with comments about how long we actually should be washing our hands and whether or not the virus will ever make it out of China.

We recently sat down for a video chat with Mimi Leder, the show’s executive producer and director, to talk about how The Morning Show’s creators aimed to thread the needle of “we can mention the pandemic, but we don’t want to get too topical, lest it be over by the time this comes out.” Leder said the show had just started filming its second season before it was forced to shutdown on March 12, 2020. That move led the team to “really reevaluate what story we were trying to tell because we are a news show reflecting the world and we felt we could tell the story of the three months leading into COVID because we all lived it and experienced it.”