The dawn is breaking on a new season of Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show,” which returns for a new season, which picks up after the anchors took aim (on-air) at the network’s top brass.
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The drama centers on the staff of a network news program upended by the sexual misconduct of an anchor. It debuted in 2019 and returns Friday (new episodes streaming weekly).
In the final minutes of the inaugural season, veteran co-host Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) and her co-anchor, Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), outed UBA network President Fred Micklen (Tom Irwin) as an enabler of the sexual misconduct by Levy’s former desk mate Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell), seemingly a stand-in for Matt Lauer of NBC’s “Today.”
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“Season 1 is more about the turmoil going on by the network that crescendos into this huge moment of change, and then where we begin at Season 2 is what happens after something that big at a workplace,” Witherspoon says.
“Everyone got fired. Everybody got a new job that didn’t get fired, and we’re navigating who’s in charge, what do I do with power, do I want power? There’s so many questions.”
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Aniston says Alex is also grappling with questions after “the rose-colored glasses come off.” In the first-season finale, Alex is rocked after learning Mitch, her close friend, took advantage of a young booker on the show, who ended up overdosing after reliving the trauma. Alex ends up leaving the morning program.
“I don’t think she’s ever looked inside and asked these questions, but I think she is finally asking the hard questions: ‘Who am I? How did I get here?’” Aniston says. “The job was so No. 1, and all that she cared about, that everything kind of all fell by the wayside, and she’s just left pretty much alone. And the need to be relevant and the need to stay on top was so important that she just became complicit, and she turned a blind eye to things that she should not have turned a blind eye to, because it didn’t matter.”
The trailer for the coming season shows network executive Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup, who won an Emmy for the role) begging Alex to come back to “The Morning Show.” He pleads: “You are the only thing that can save us.” Ratings have taken a dive, and it seems viewers consider Bradley a flash in the pan.
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Aniston says Alex foolishly believes “she can carry whatever wisdom she’s collected and self-awareness back into the same halls that she walked before. But there’s so many bodies still buried, and all of a sudden the walls start to creep in on her and close in on her. She’s yet again trying to just stay afloat and survive at any cost. Then she has a real reckoning, a real come to Jesus when some very emotional situations take place that I think finally lead her into actually truly understanding the core of who she is.”
Die-hard truth teller Bradley isn’t going down without a fight. She declares in this season’s trailer: “I’m not gonna get edged out.”
“My character has so much exploration: who she is as a businesswoman versus what’s going on in her personal life,” Witherspoon says. “She’s exploring a new relationship that’s really exciting to her, but then it becomes very public, and that’s really confusing. Then her brother, who’s struggling with addiction, comes into her work. There’s just so much complexity. It’s messy.”
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The season also borrows other details from real life, revisiting the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. For Aniston, that mirroring of reality made more sense than trying to ignore the plague.
“Oddly, it was kind of nice to be able to do that,” she says. “I would feel even stranger to be – I don’t know – doing a Western or something and you really had to just live in an alternate universe where COVID doesn’t exist.
“In the eight months/nine months, that we were locked down, the writers were rewriting the show and watching news shows try to figure out the new norm and how they’re going to continue their broadcasting and delivering the news. So (they were) trying to figure out how we could weave that into our show without banging people over the head with it ’cause of course you’re like, ‘I don’t know. How long is COVID gonna be around? Are people going to want hear about COVID?'”
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Many Americans’ initial glimpse of Aniston was that of a wet runaway bride in the “Friends” pilot. Her first scene found her character, Rachel Green, reuniting with high school friend Monica Geller (Courteney Cox, left) in Central Perk after ditching her fiance at the altar.
By the show’s second episode, shot months after the pilot, Aniston had gotten her eponymous ‘do, one of the most popular haircuts of the 1990s.
Just before “Friends” began its second season in September 1995, Aniston and co-star Matthew Perry attended the Emmys together. The show earned several nominations for its freshman season, including supporting-acting nods for Kudrow and David Schwimmer.
The “Rachel” was in full effect when she appeared at the VH1 Honors in 1995.
By 1996, Aniston was also in demand as a film actress, playing a supporting role in the Ed Burns film “She’s the One.”
In July 1996, she posed for USA TODAY while promoting her romantic comedy “Picture Perfect,” which was released the following year.
1998’s pivotal Season 4 finale of “Friends” shook up the Ross-Rachel dynamic, when he accidentally said “I take thee, Rachel” at his wedding to Emily (Helen Baxendale, center). In order to to save that relationship, Ross (Schwimmer) agreed to Emily’s demand that he cut Rachel out of his life. That didn’t last long.
Aniston began dating Brad Pitt in 1998, and they attended the Emmys the following year, where “Friends” was nominated for best comedy series. They married on July 29, 2000.
Aniston began 2001 with a People’s Choice Award for favorite female television performer.
That month, she was also nominated for best supporting TV actress at the Golden Globes.
Pitt guest-starred in the November 2001 Thanksgiving episode of “Friends,” playing a formerly fat classmate of Rachel nursing a grudge against her for how she treated him.
Rachel, who viewers learned had gotten pregnant following a hookup with ex Ross in the lead-up to Monica and Chandler’s wedding, gave birth to daughter Emma in the two-part Season 8 finale “The One Where Rachel has a Baby.”
Pitt was once again by Aniston’s side as she walked the carpet at the 2002 Emmys.
That year, she won her first Emmy for lead actress on “Friends.” She was nominated for playing Rachel five times in all.
The following year, Aniston won the Golden Globe for her role on “Friends.”
In 2002’s “The Good Girl,” Aniston played an unhappily married retail clerk who has an affair with a younger co-worker (Jake Gyllenhaal). It was one of several frumpy characters that would bring her critical acclaim.
Aniston leaned on Pitt at the 2003 IFP Independent Spirit Awards, where she was up for best female lead for her performance in “The Good Girl.”
May 2004 brought the series finale of “Friends,” wrapping a 10-year run. Rachel’s story arc ended with her passing on a fashion job in Paris to remain in New York with Ross, or as Phoebe once deemed him, “her lobster.”
Pitt and Aniston’s relationship still looked to be on solid ground at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival premiere of his swords-and-sandals film “Troy,” where they showed affection for each other.
The couple walked what would be their final Emmy red carpet together in September 2004.
Aniston and Pitt announced they were separating in January 2005, launching a tabloid frenzy. Within a few months, the world would see his chemistry with his “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” co-star Angelina Jolie onscreen and those two would take their relationship public.
That April, a tabloid-shy Aniston traveled to Courtney Cox’s home state of Alabama for the christening of her co-star’s daughter Coco.
In September 2005, Aniston opened up to Vanity Fair about the end of her marriage to Pitt, including rumors that her refusal to have children played a role. “A man divorcing would never be accused of choosing career over children,” she told the magazine. “That really (ticked) me off. I’ve never in my life said I didn’t want to have children.”
In January 2006, Aniston bundled up to promote “Friends With Money” at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where she got a hug from founder and Sundance Institute President Robert Redford.
Aniston’s next public romance was with Vince Vaughn, her co-star from the 2006 comedy “The Break-Up.” The couple, seen here at that year’s French Open tennis tournament in June, split later that year.
She dated singer John Mayer for about a year starting in 2008. They couple hit the 2009 Oscars together.
In 2008, Aniston starred opposite Owen Wilson as the owners of rambunctious yellow Labrador retriever in the doggie dramedy “Marley & Me.”
In 2010’s “The Bounty Hunter,” Aniston played the bail-skipping wife of a bail-enforcement agent (Gerard Butler) who is hired to bring her in.
In 2010, she re-teamed with another co-star from “Horrible Bosses,” Jason Bateman, for “The Switch.” The movie’s title refers to the plot’s premise, in which Bateman ‘s character swaps his semen for that of the sperm donor Aniston’s was using to conceive a child.
In 2011, Aniston played a dentist with a penchant for sexual harassment in “Horrible Bosses.” Here, she acts inappropriately with her assistant, played by Charlie Day.
In 2010, Aniston reunited with Paul Rudd, her co-star from “The Object of My Affection” in “Wanderlust,” in which they played an unemployed couple who ditch the New York rat race in favor of a Georgia hippie commune. The film also co-starred her future second husband, Justin Theroux, right, as one of those hippies.
Theroux and Aniston got engaged in October 2012.
In 2013, she starred opposite “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Jason Sudeikis in “We’re the Millers,” posing as a family to smuggle an RV full of marijuana through the U.S./Mexico border.
Her next drug-themed project was far darker. In 2014’s “Cake,” Aniston went against type as a woman who becomes dependent on pain medication following a car accident that left her physically disabled and her son dead. She also becomes reliant on her caretaker (Adriana Barraza).
While shooting her 2016 rom-com “Mother’s Day,” Aniston took the opportunity to shoot a selfie with director Garry Marshall and his wife Barbara.
Aniston presents the In Memorium segment at the 2017 Academy Awards.
After coming offstage at the Oscars, Aniston was spotted canoodling in the hall with her husband.
Aniston sported an asymmetrical leather minidress at the final-season premiere of his HBO drama “The Leftovers” in April 2017.
By her side through all of it: her friend, Courteney Cox.
In June 2019, Netflix released the movie “Murder Mystery,” in which Aniston and Adam Sandler play a near-broke married couple who go on a 15-years-delayed European honeymoon and wind up being invited on a billionaire’s yacht where a murder takes place.
Aniston returned to TV alongside Reese Witherspoon Steve Carell on Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show” in October 2019. The series stars Aniston as an over-the-hill news anchor, Witherspoon as an upstart and Carell and a #MeToo’d anchor (think Matt Lauer).
Aniston was honored at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s 4th Annual Patron of the Artists Awards on Nov. 7 with her friends, Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow, by her side.
She was awarded outstanding performance by a female actor in a drama series at the 2020 Screen Actors Guild Awards for “The Morning Show”…
… And broke the internet that night when photos of her and ex Brad Pitt chatting surfaced.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘The Morning Show’: Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon on what’s next in Season 2
