The Morning Show is kind of about Matt Lauer, even though Jennifer Aniston doesn’t want you to think so.
The Apple TV Plus series, which begins streaming Nov. 1, tells the story of a fictional morning host, Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell), whose network fires him after a sexual assault scandal. Aniston, who plays his co-host, stars alongside Reese Witherspoon as the man’s replacement.
Yet the show wasn’t originally supposed to be about the #MeToo movement at all. Suddenly, when the news broke in 2017 about Lauer’s alleged pattern of sexual harassment while co-host of NBC’s Today, The Morning Show‘s creators rewrote the script.
While new sexual assault and harassment allegations against Lauer have begun swirling this week, Aniston told Variety that she show isn’t about him.
“I went to the DVR that I had of Today before Matt Lauer was fired and then the day he was fired, because that was so fascinating to see,” she said. “Mitch Kessler is not based on him at all. He’s just sort of the archetype of all of the men that he’s representing.”
Maybe the “archetype” means an amalgamation of Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, and former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, whose alleged abuses are documented in the upcoming film Bombshell. Aniston is probably contractually obligated to distance the show from its real-life inspirations, but the parallels are clear.
The recent allegations against Lauer arose from Catch & Release, a new book by Ronan Farrow, whose reporting on the Weinstein story helped ignite the #MeToo movement. When she originally heard the news about Lauer, Aniston was crestfallen.
“I was so devastated,” she said. “It’s such a strange thing; it felt oddly like my dad did something terrible. I trusted him and had been interviewed by him. He was there for so many moments in my life. And when Friends was ending, it was Katie [Couric] and Matt interviewing us.”
Nevertheless, the characters in The Morning Show are “all fictional,” she insists. But, they’re “also kind of highlighting aspects of the archetype of a charming narcissist, of a generation of men that didn’t think that was bad behavior.”
If the show wanted to create that same feeling that Aniston felt after learning the allegations against a respected public figure, it did well to have Kessler played by Carell, the beloved star of The Office. If Kessler isn’t Lauer, he’s Bill Cosby or Woody Allen or CBS’s Les Moonves.
The Morning Show may insist that it’s not about Lauer, but it is about powerful men like him, men who hide behind their public images until the truth is finally out.
