How The Morning Show Season 2 Conjured Italy Without Leaving L.A.

A model of this story in regards to the manufacturing design of “The Morning Present” first appeared within the Beneath-the-Line Difficulty of TheWrap’s awards journal.

Producer and director Mimi Leder promised manufacturing designer Nelson Coates that he’d have numerous issues to design if he joined Apple’s collection “The Morning Present” for its second season, however he had no thought simply how sophisticated the job would get. For that, you’ll be able to blame the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down manufacturing three-and-a-half weeks into Season 2 and despatched the present’s writing employees right into a hiatus spree that resulted in a wholly rewritten season.

“Once we got here again, what I assumed could be contained and comfy with a small forged as an alternative had gotten huge,” Coates mentioned, laughing. “The primary scene they handed me was Instances Sq. on New 12 months’s Eve, and we additionally had Las Vegas, Inexperienced Bay, New Orleans, Lake Como in Italy, Beijing, Wuhan…”

To complicate issues, quarantine guidelines meant that the manufacturing couldn’t depart Southern California — sorry, no journeys to New York Metropolis to shoot a couple of days of exteriors for a present set in Manhattan — and upscale cities like Beverly Hills and Pasadena had banned all filming. Plus, he mentioned, “the actors didn’t actually wish to go into buildings in downtown L.A.”

“The Morning Present” ended up taking on a stage at Sony and constructing a complete workplace complicated there. “We had eight weeks from the minute I began drawing till filming to create workplaces, convention rooms, an enormous bullpen space, hallways and elevators,” he mentioned. “After which the partitions would fly on the finish of hallways and the graphics and furnishings would change to develop into an entire different flooring. We have been in a position to do 24,000 toes of workplace in a 12,000-square-foot footprint.”

The New York road scenes have been principally shot in downtown Los Angeles, though the manufacturing by no means traveled there. (For Season 1, it spent 4 days there.) “I needed to make the present actually really feel prefer it was shot in New York,” Coates mentioned. “So in sequences in eating places the place you see New York outdoors the home windows, we included the scaffolding, the road distributors, the little nook kiosks the place you’ll be able to cost your telephone. We had numerous buses and 18 taxis on a regular basis, and we tried to create a world of life that nobody would guess was performed in L.A.”

The interiors, in the meantime, have been related to the characters, with Billy Crudup’s media-company CEO, Cory Ellison, getting a very spectacular house in a complicated residential high-rise. “We needed to provide him a presidential suite, an influence suite,” Coates mentioned. “However on the identical time, the primary season ended with sexual-harassment components, so I needed to really feel the pervasiveness of a sure form of artwork and imagery. So over the mattress is a reclining nude, and there are a number of female and male figures constructed into the units.”

In downtown L.A., Coates additionally discovered a courtyard that may very well be remodeled into New Orleans’ French Quarter. For a practice station in Wuhan, China, the place a reporter goes at first of the pandemic, he used a Metrolink station in Anaheim that had related structure to 1 in Wuhan, together with his crew reworking an eight-car practice right into a Chinese language subway practice in a single hour.

(Metrolink officers loaned them the practice however wouldn’t allow them to gown its exterior till it arrived on the station simply earlier than filming.)

After which there was Lake Como, the place Steve Carell’s character has retreated after a intercourse scandal ended his profession in Season 1. “Understanding Italy very effectively, I knew that Piazza Cavour in Como appears proper out onto the lake and has cobblestones,” he mentioned. “And I knew two streets in L.A. that had cobblestones like those there, they usually had buildings that have been Italianate in construction. So we used these and lined up the L.A. brick on the buildings.

‘I used to be in a position to make two full streets, after which we might use blue display screen to develop the streets and put extensions on prime of the buildings. We additionally had some buildings that have been seen in reverse photographs that we didn’t have entry to, however they allow us to put components in entrance of the home windows. So whenever you do reverses of Steve Carell, it appears like you’ve fully-dressed buildings simply by placing tables and awnings out in entrance of them.”

For the lavish villa the place Carell’s character lives, Coates scoured the Southern California cities that also allowed filming and located an property simply outdoors Pasadena that architect William Neff had constructed within the Twenties, allegedly based mostly on a Florence residence designed by Michelangelo. “A highschool had been utilizing it for an occasions middle,” he mentioned, “and we satisfied them to allow us to panorama the entire thing, paint it, do fake marble and stone and add architectural element. I feel it labored out fairly effectively.”

For the interiors, he introduced in a combination of actual antiques and extra trendy furnishings. “It was designed to seem like years and years of a household proudly owning it,” he mentioned. “There’s a flat-screen TV in a single room however a tube TV within the different. My European buddies who’ve that stage of opulence don’t change all the pieces out the way in which we do in the USA, the place we have now to have the newest and the best. They’re extra like, ‘No, we’ve had this without end and it nonetheless works.’”

In the long run, the complete season was shot in Southern California through the pandemic, regardless of all these scenes happening world wide.. “They might plop scripts on my desk and go, ‘So, how are you gonna determine this one out?’” he mentioned with a smile. “However I’m fairly used to developing with options.”

Learn extra from the Beneath-the-Line Difficulty right here.