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Cancel culture dominates season 2 of ‘The Morning Show’

NEW YORK — Season two of “The Morning Show,” starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, had filmed just 13 days when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down production in March 2020.

The writers for the show about the behind-the-scenes drama of a morning news program soon decided that the scripts should reflect what was happening in the world. Instead of diving right into the chaos of the early days — lockdowns and quarantines — the new season, debuting Sept. 17 on Apple TV+, unfolds in the first months of 2020 leading up to the declaration of a pandemic. Before that, the coronavirus had been looming but seemed like a problem far removed.

“Everything that you’re doing while you don’t know what’s about to hit you is exactly what we were trying to capture,” said Witherspoon.

These script changes were a sense of deja vu for the writers. The planned plot of season one had also changed course. That revision incorporated the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements that exposed misconduct by men in media and entertainment, most notably disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

The first season saw Aniston and Witherspoon’s characters often pitted against one another. In season two, there’s less time to spar because everybody’s got their own problems. Each character confronts questions of identity, in both how they’re seen by the world at large and how they view themselves.

Desean Terry plays disenfranchised news anchor Daniel, who is told outright that he’s as big as he’s ever going to get so he should be satisfied. As a Black man, he feels a responsibility to represent people of color and share their stories, and he’s not getting the opportunity to do so.

“I hope people see those nuances that can happen,” said Terry. “The system wears on you and it starts to actually really impact you in this very deep and personal way and you take on the cost. We see him call out the system but also an insecurity creeps in.”

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