The Morning Show Finale: Show Boss Goes Deep on Alex and Bradley’s Game-Changing Moves — Plus, Grade It!

Warning: This post contains spoilers from The Morning Show‘s Season 3 finale. Proceed accordingly.

Welcome to UBA’s new world order.

By the end of The Morning Show‘s Season 3 finale, Alex Levy has a) realized that Paul Marks was spying on everyone, b) thwarted his plans to acquire UBA, c) broken up with the tech billionaire and d) put in motion a potential merger between her network and its competitor, NBN. Not bad for an hour’s time, eh?

Meanwhile, Bradley decides to turn herself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation after realizing that she has to do the right thing and, with Hal, admit her role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

In short, the hour — which hits the streamer today  — leaves UBA’s biggest anchors on very unsure footing as we head into Season 4. TVLine spoke with showrunner Charlotte Stoudt, who joined The Morning Show ahead of Season 3, about what to expect when we next meet up with Alex, Bradley & Co.

TVLINE | Obviously Paul Marks is our villain for the season. But was there ever a point where you saw Jon Hamm and Jennifer Aniston on camera, and their chemistry, and you were like, “I don’t know… maybe there’s a little more staying power for this guy past this season?”
Well, everyone on this show is very flawed, and everyone makes moral mistakes — some quite large, some quite small — so I wanted Paul to be someone like that, as well. He has both really good qualities, and some not very good qualities, and he’s just as imperfect as everyone else on the show, so I never saw him as really a straight villain. I guess that was important, and part of the fun is, “Is he? Isn’t he?” and sort of keeping that on a bit of a tightrope and that you can’t quite land until maybe the very end on how you feel about him. And even then, he is a human being. In the last scene you see he really was in love with her and still is in love with her, and he’s struggling with what she did versus how he might still feel about her. So, I wanted to keep it complicated and not just have a simple like, “Oh, now this guy’s bad and that’s all I have to think about him.”

TVLINE | We’ve seen Alex go through a pretty public metamorphosis since the show began. Can you speak a bit about why now she is able to be the strategic thinker that pulls together a solution to UBA’s crisis and outsmarts Paul?
I think it’s a lot of things. She did go through a near-death experience during the pandemic, and I think what we saw at the end of Season 2 was the beginning of that shift. Like, she realized, “Oh, I could’ve died.” And that was a sort of radical wakeup. And she also, you know as we see in Episode [5], she got back to her roots as a reporter. After she got better from COVID, she and Chip went out on the street and she started Alex Unfiltered, and she kind of got back to the thing that got her excited about this kind of work anyway. So she reclaimed some of that initial pure drive to tell a story. So, I think that’s part of it.

And I also think Paul has something to do with it. And for me, again on this question of is Paul good or bad, I always thought Paul is the person who pushes people to declare themselves. And so, in a funny way, I think he teaches her how to take him down. [Laughs] I’m not saying it’s all Paul and she didn’t have it in her, that’s not what I’m saying. But I think he does kind of say “you can be this ruthless and decisive when you have to be,” and then she just happens to do it to him. It’s been a long time building I think, you know, starting from Season 1 when she hires Bradley just as a power move to try to keep her anchor chair. And then the very woman she brings in holds her to moral account. So I think she’s reacting to everything that’s happened to her.

TVLINE | Bradley ends the season in a rough spot: Turning herself in for her role in covering up Hal’s part in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Let’s just say maybe there will be a second act for her in the coming season. But as you guys pointed out this season, anchors who lose the public’s trust usually aren’t journalists for much longer.
Yeah.

TVLINE | And being a journalist is so much a part of her identity. Has she thought about what her life might look like, if/when she is free in the future?
That’s a very good question. I think she knows the potential consequences of walking into that FBI office. I think she understands that it means she could never be an anchor again and probably never work at a large [news] organization. But I think getting clean and really resolving this family story that we see the flashes of at the beginning of [Episode] 10, the carrying of this burden of “you supposedly wrecked the family, Bradley,” but also realizing that she’s a little bit become her father by not wanting to tell the truth and own up to something she did that really was a little bit sketchy and a little bit crossing the line, especially for her profession. That she’s realizing that she’s perpetuating the family cycle and that for her own sanity [and] for the future of Hal’s daughter that she just simply has to put it to an end and that, that has an emotional urgency that almost overrides anything else.

Just the relief of being done with it trumps any feeling, any other feelings of  “What’s going to happen to me in the future?” I think she just has to do it.

TVLINE | Let’s talk about Chris for a moment. She became this figurehead for UBA’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiative, but — as often happens in real life — then we don’t see a lot of real change in those areas by the end of the season. Why did you choose for her not to have a huge win there?
…The place needed a more wholesale change in order to really shake things up and achieve these bigger goals. And I will say it was very important to us when we talked about you know Episode 3, the Cybil email and everything, that it wasn’t a very special episode about race. And that that question of inequality is a question that the solution for that is slow, and difficult, and there’s a lot of corporate pushback and that it might take more than one season to try to achieve that. So, like, the work is not done at UBA by the end, all we know is that they have another chance to try to make things right.

I think it’s more that. It’s an ongoing thing, and it’s very present in people’s minds, but how are they actually going to make it work? Of course you have to chase the guy out, and then the women have to try, like,”What can we do? Can we actually run this a different way? Is that possible?” And that might be, you know, part of the adventures of Season 4. It’s a thread we’re pulling from one season to another. I guess that would be the short answer. [Laughs]

TVLINE | And then Chip is the network’s savior, with his F-bomb-laden rant. Was it all scripted?
…I did feel like Chip needed a moment, because he hates Paul so much. [Laughs]  For both good reasons and perhaps more personal reasons. So he needed his moment to flip the bird to Paul.

I guess one of the interesting things was I spoke to our consultant Brian Stelter who, you know, wrote Top of the Morning. I just actually asked him, “Tell me, from soup to nuts, how a story gets on a morning-news show. Take me through every single step.” And the truth is that monologue was about twice as long when Brian went through every single step that it takes, and we had to cut it a little because it was just very long. It was essentially twice as long, but I really wanted to show the competence porn of it, you know?

Like, these are professionals, and they take their job seriously. And I think in a world where there’s just so much nonsense, there’s something really comforting about the fact that there’s just a chain of command and a process for doing this, and fact-checking, and vetting and doing all those things. And even if you think, you know, some aspects of morning shows are fluffy and silly that they are usually the first people in the morning to tell you what’s going on… There is a value.

…It’s like you need the whole ecosystem of news to have any sense of the complexity of the world and these issues. So, it just felt like Chip should represent that.

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