‘The Morning Show’ Returns This Fall for a Fourth Season
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While most of the shows that kicked off Apple TV+ nearly six years ago have long since reached their conclusions, two of its crown jewels are still going strong. Last year, Apple renewed For All Mankind for a fifth season, and this week, it announced that The Morning Show will return this fall for its fourth.
The series, which convinced Jennifer Aniston to return to TV and made her and co-star Reese Witherspoon the highest-paid TV stars in Hollywood, was an early runaway success for Apple’s fledgling streaming service. While it didn’t garner the accolades of Ted Lasso, it racked up dozens of award nominations before the first season ended, including multiple Golden Globe nominations.
While Apple got shut out at the Golden Globes (and slammed by host Ricky Gervais), Jennifer Aniston received a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series, and supporting actor Billy Crudup won a 2020 Critics Choice Award for his portrayal of Cory Ellison.
Years in the works, The Morning Show was the first major Apple TV+ project we heard about back in 2017 when Apple’s streaming ambitions were merely the stuff of rumors. It didn’t have a title back then, but it was clear it was going to be a “morning show drama” and that Aniston and Witherspoon would both star and co-own the series as executive producers.
When Apple finally unveiled the service as Apple TV+ in March 2019, the two stars took the stage, alongside other luminaries such as Steven Spielberg and Oprah, to announce that The Morning Show would be one of Apple’s debut shows. While Apple had many other projects in the works, some of which it also highlighted at the event, not everything showed up all at once.
In fact, The Morning Show was one of only three drama series that were available when Apple TV+ launched on November 1, 2019, alongside For All Mankind and See, the latter of which ended in October 2022 after three seasons. The other launch shows were Apple’s first comedy series, Dickinson, and a lineup of kids’ programming that included Snoopy in Space, Helpsters, and Ghostwriter.
A few more, like Octavia Spencer’s Truth be Told and M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant appeared a few weeks later, but to say there wasn’t much to watch on Apple TV+ at launch would be an understatement. That meant that what was there had to be very good. Fortunately, most of it was, which was good as Apple had reportedly spent over $6 billion on only a handful of shows, with single episodes rivaling the budget of feature films in some cases.
The Morning Show and For All Mankind both hit it out of the park, which is undoubtedly why they’re still running. The Aniston-Witherspoon-led drama had a slow start, possibly due to too much exposition, but it ramped up quickly by the end of the third episode. It also put a group of stars best known for lighter fare into some serious dramatic roles. The characters Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carrell portrayed were nothing like those they played on Friends, Legally Blonde, or The Office — so much so that The Guardian film critic Stuart Heritage called the first season of The Morning Show “TV so excellent it will make you totally resent Friends.”
While The Morning Show has a core narrative arc across its first three seasons, each stands somewhat alone with a prevailing theme. Season 1 focused on the scandal of the main lead anchor, Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell), being fired over sexual assault allegations and the complicity of the network’s power brokers. Season 2 picks up after those explosive events but delves deeper into the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact, and then season 3 shifts gears to see the network being acquired by a tech billionaire and the shifting of the media landscape from traditional broadcasting.
Following the conclusion of season 3 in November 2023, reports circulated that season 4 would focus on deepfakes and AI and how they impact news. Apple confirmed this in Wednesday’s press release:
Season four of “The Morning Show” opens in spring 2024, almost two years after the events of season three. With the UBA-NBN merger complete, the newsroom must grapple with newfound responsibility, hidden motives and the elusive nature of truth in a polarized America. In a world rife with deepfakes, conspiracy theories and corporate cover-ups — who can you trust? And how can you know what’s actually real?
The news also confirms the cast for season 4, which will naturally still be headlined by Aniston, Witherspoon, and Billy Crudup. Karen Pittman, Nicole Beharie, Nestor Carbonell, Mark Duplass, Greta Lee, and Jon Hamm will also return from season 3.
New cast members for season 4 include Academy Award winners Marion Cotillard ( La Vie en Rose and Inception) and Jeremy Irons (Reversal of Fortune, Die Hard with a Vengeance), along with Aaron Pierre (The Underground Railroad), William Jackson Harper (The Good Place), and Boyd Holbrook (Narcos).
Season 4 of The Morning Show will debut on Apple TV+ on Wednesday, September 17, 2025, for another ten-episode run, which gives us plenty of time to catch up on the last three seasons in time for the season 4 premiere. See below for some more photos from Apple’s first look.
