“The Morning Show” Season 4 tackled everything from deepfakes, Olympic doping scandals, media mergers to AI doubling as people’s therapists. For director and executive producer Mimi Leder, the show’s staying power is in capturing the zeitgeist.
“The show is about the moment we are living in, which is dramatic. It’s tumultuous,” Leder tells Variety‘s senior artisans editor Jazz Tangcay. “The world just throws stuff at us. We almost have to subtract what the world is throwing at us and see how it fits organically into our characters.”
Following the UBA-NBN merger, one Season 4 storyline follows anchor Alex (Jennifer Aniston) getting deepfaked, which threatens her public image and career. “How do you shoot that, by the way? We had to figure that out,” Leder said. “I had to watch a deepfake and that was really challenging because that’s something you don’t ever want to watch.”
Tackling so many different issues is what Leder loves about the show: “It’s so messy and our characters are so ambitious.” With the deepfake storyline, for example, Stella (Greta Lee) and Alex’s different viewpoints are pitted against one another, reflecting the real world conversations people are having about AI’s use in society.
