Last week, a curated group of six notable women—including CBS Mornings cohost Gayle King—spent 11 minutes in space aboard the New Shepard, a rocket d
Last week, a curated group of six notable women—including CBS Mornings cohost Gayle King—spent 11 minutes in space aboard the New Shepard, a rocket developed by the Jeff Bezos–owned Blue Origin. If the scene looked a little familiar, it may be because Reese Witherspoon’s fictional TV anchor Bradley Jackson made a very similar trek on a 2023 episode of the Apple TV+ drama The Morning Show.
In the season three premiere, titled “The Kármán Line”—a.k.a. the boundary that delineates space from Earth’s atmosphere—Bradley is launched about 62 miles into space alongside her boss, Billy Crudup’s Cory Ellison, and tech billionaire Paul Marks (Jon Hamm). Marks has funded the televised Hyperion One space launch, and hopes to one day acquire the titular morning show’s fictional network, UBA. “After two years of a pandemic and now a war in Ukraine, it’s incredible to look down and see how connected we all are,” Bradley tells viewers from space. In real life, Blue Origin flight NS-31 crew members Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez, Bezos’s fiancée, also described feeling “connected” upon returning to Earth.
While some clocked the parallels between The Morning Show and last week’s flight, series showrunner Charlotte Stoudt, who took over from Morning Show cocreator Kerry Ehrin at the start of season three, missed the launch entirely. “I’ll be honest: I did not watch it,” she tells Vanity Fair. “We’re in the middle of post-[production] on season four, so I’m not watching, really, anything.”
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Stoudt did catch Good Morning America host Michael Strahan’s Blue Origin flight in December 2021—and was inspired to write something similar into her inaugural episode of The Morning Show. She was struck by the irony of a “kind of phallic rocket” launching from Texas, the same state that, only three months earlier, banned most abortions at about six weeks into a pregnancy.
“It seemed the tension was just sitting there,” says Stoudt, “between something that was trying to go up and out, and the women on the ground in Texas who didn’t have rocket fuel, but who were moving back and forth across the border trying to give women some kind of access to reproductive health care.”
Stoudt worked reproductive rights into season three’s premiere more overtly as well. After announcing her abortion on air in the first season, Bradley Jackson, who’s now hosting the evening news, chases a story about a Texas woman named Luna who crosses the Mexican border once a month to smuggle abortion pills to women in her state. But network bosses Stella (Greta Lee) and Cory kill the story, hoping to keep Bradley as neutral as possible so she can cover the 2024 election. As a show of solidarity against leadership that she feels is failing, Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy volunteers to go to the border in Bradley’s place—leaving her former coanchor to take Alex’s spot broadcasting from space.
The episode marked “an incredibly convulsive moment in America: the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, January 6. Emotionally, people felt really unmoored,” says Stoudt. “And to me, the image of a woman floating in zero gravity just sort of felt like that captured something.”
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