“It was a lot of work,” remembers “The Morning Show” showrunner Kerry Ehrin about the unique challenges of season two of the Apple TV+ drama series. The new season had just started filming when COVID-19 brought production to a halt in March 2020. Then the team regrouped to incorporate COVID into the storyline. But “once you get a concept for how you’re going to do it, then you’re just executing it … so we rolled up our sleeves and no one knew what was going to happen.” We talked with Ehrin as part of our Writers Guild Awards nominees panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
The series follows the behind-the-scenes drama at a daily morning news program. Season one explored the fallout from the #MeToo movement as one of the show’s anchors, Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell), is fired amid sexual misconduct allegations. Season two continues that storyline, while also tackling the initial days of the pandemic in Italy and New York, two of the early epicenters of COVID. “One of the challenges of this show in particular is that you are writing about current events, and yet it’s going to air a year later. So you’re always a little bit rolling the dice and hoping you get close,” Ehrin explains. “It was interesting really to work on it, to see it unfolding as we went.”
Now Ehrin is nominated fro two WGA Awards: Best Drama Series with her entire writing team and Best Episodic Drama for “La Amara Vita,” the episode she penned with Scott Troy that concludes Mitch’s story with a final reckoning between him and his former co-anchor Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) in Italy. “We always wanted to finish that story with Alex because it really was the foundation of where she began in the beginning of the show,” says Ehirn. “It felt important to get her to a place of closure and to finish his story as well.” It was tricky to balance the conflicting emotions and moral implications of Mitch and Alex’s relationship, but they wanted to “bite into the complicated, fucked up nature of loving somebody or having loved somebody who was capable of doing bad things.”
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