The Morning Show Showrunner Explains That Huge Season 3 Finale Twist For Reese Witherspoon's Bradley Jackson
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The recently wrapped season of The Morning Show was full of soapy goodness, featuring a steamy romance for Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy and tech billionaire Paul Marks in Jon Hamm’s TV comeback and increasingly turbulent times for Cory, Stella and the rest of the UBA staff. However, it was Bradley Jackson who dug herself into the deepest hole, after destroying evidence from the January 6 Capitol attack, and this season’s new showrunner Charlotte Stoudt explained why we saw that huge twist for Reese Witherspoon’s character.
Bradley Jackson has always been an intense truth-seeker on The Morning Show (with Season 3 available to stream now with an AppleTV+ subscription), but she’s also an impulsive character who carries a lot of baggage in regards to her childhood and her small-town family. That really played into the Season 3 storyline, Charlotte Stoudt told Variety, explaining:
Early on, there was the thought of, if Bradley’s the truth teller, what happens if Bradley gets a little high on the UBA drug? Her incredible platform, and her salary. What if she steps over the line in some way? She’s obviously the character who most straddles the divide of the country in terms of her background, and now being in what some people would call the you know the coastal elite. So how does this person put those two sides of herself together, and what’s the crucible where we could see that?
We saw this divide in a flashback this season, when it was revealed that Bradley’s mom contracted and ultimately died from COVID after refusing to wear a mask, but it was during the Capitol riots that things got really messy.
Bradley happened to be in the Capitol when the raid began, and she was documenting the events with her phone when she saw her brother Hal assault a Capitol police officer. She made the choice to delete the footage in hopes of saving her brother, despite her recordings being subpoenaed for the federal investigation that followed. The showrunner continued:
It’s sitting right there with Jan. 6. I was actually worried it might be too on-the-nose, but what helps that story was that it was very, very personal. It wasn’t about politics. It was really about what happens when you and someone else are across this divide in the country. There was a story about a teenage son whose father was an insurrectionist, and he recorded his father on the phone and shared it with the FBI. These resources it would take to have the courage to take your father down, it’s really intense. And that made me think of Bradley turning in her dad when she was just a kid.
We learned in earlier seasons that Bradley and Hal’s father was sent to prison after Bradley informed police that he was driving drunk when he’d killed a child. Their family was never the same after that, particularly with Hal falling into addiction. Knowing that, on top of Bradley not being able to save her mom from COVID, and you can see why she chose to prioritize her family over the truth this time around.
The truth-teller in Bradley prevailed in the end, as Bradley resigned from UBA, and she and Hal turned themselves in to the FBI at the end of the season finale to face whatever consequences await. We’ll have to see how that big twist affects Season 4, which was already ordered before Season 3 aired. In the meantime, though, check out some of the other best shows to stream on AppleTV+.
