Ever wonder what really goes on behind the scenes of your favorite morning show? As research for his latest project, The Morning Show, production designer John Paino found out for himself, taking a predawn field trip to the Manhattan sets of Good Morning America and Today in 2018. He figured the experience would prove worthwhile, but he didn’t realize he’d be left slack-jawed. “It’s like being in a submarine underwater and being ready for battle,” Paino (Big Little Lies) explains to Architectural Digest. “It’s so crowded. Everyone has a station and a specific job. It’s a high-stakes pressure cooker. And it’s all for two hours of broadcasting!”
You’ll witness the same breathless atmosphere in The Morning Show, the buzzy 10-episode drama about the world of facts-and-fluff morning TV launching on the new Apple TV+ streaming service on November 1. Jennifer Aniston plays Alex Levy, the beloved queen of the slumping a.m. program (also titled The Morning Show), while Reese Witherspoon is Bradley Jackson, the outspoken TV correspondent nipping at her designer heels. At the outset, Alex greets viewers with the grim news that her charismatic cohost (Steve Carell) has been fired in the wake of sexual harassment claims.
Paino says he “started with realism” in devising the set of the fictional show-within-a-show. “The challenge is that you can’t be fantastical, but you don’t want to be derivative, and yet it still has to look nice,” he explains of his work, which was built and filmed on the Sony soundstage in L.A. “I think we hit that sweet spot.”
The sleek, brightly lit stage where the cohosts gab and interview guests represents up-to-the-minute technology along with the meshing of news and entertainment. In other words, the opposite of those cozy, wood-paneled living-room-style backdrops from the 1980s and early 1990s. The centerpiece: the LED screen beaming behind the hosts. “When I go to New York, I notice this electronic glow and buzz from people’s phones on the street,” he notes. “So I wanted that shade of blue to be the tone in everything on that set.”
The plexiglass desk, dubbed “the teacup” for its shape and daintiness, was purchased from a company that makes canopies for airplanes and spacecrafts. The see-through element is intentional. “Jennifer and Steve are supposed to be coming into people’s homes and be transparent,” Paino says. (As for the open view of their legs? “Jen wears a lot of pants,” he says.)
The offstage scenes are intended to appear far less alluring. “These shows are in buildings constructed in the 1920s and 30s and made for radio, [and they are very cramped],” he says. He filled the set with as many cables, buttons, cameras, and papers as possible to underline the messy surroundings. Plus, there was an added layer of technical complication: “We’re shooting a show about shooting a show, so all the TV cameras and the TV feeds had to be in sync with ours,” he says. He did make sure there was sufficient space backstage and in the halls to showcase retro-looking show logos. “I want viewers to see the history of the show and the station on display,” he says.
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Alex’s dressing room, meanwhile, is also stuffed…with items such as homemade fan signs, drawings that viewers made in their homes, photos of her husband and daughter, and framed faux magazine covers. “We even came up with books that Jen’s character would have written, and framed the New York Times best seller list,” he notes. And, of course, the space is strewn with clothes. For inspiration, Paino also relied on inside access: “We peeked inside Hoda Kotb’s dressing room when we were at NBC,” he admits. “Jen’s room looks just as fantastic.”
To that end, Paino hopes Kotb and her peers flip the script and do a Morning Show set visit during the production of season two, which is already in the works. “If it’s a hit,” he says, “they will come.”
