When I speak to The Morning Show executive producer Mimi Leder in September, it’s only a few days after she’s finished editing the show’s season three finale, which she also directed. “My husband hasn’t even seen the show,” Leder tells me over Zoom. “He wants to watch it as a viewer. He’s walked into the room when I’m working on a scene, but he hasn’t seen an episode, and I’m really excited to see it through his fresh eyes. Because I’m not fresh…there’s a point when you make something [that] you can’t see it anymore.”

Titled “The Overview Effect,” the third conclusion to what Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson has anointed “the weirdest series on television” forces both Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy and Reese Witherspoon’s Bradley to confront their season-long dilemmas. The Hyperion-UBA deal that would see Jon Hamm’s tech billionaire Paul Marks take ownership of the fledgling network comes to a vote just as Alex discovers a few skeletons in her powerful boyfriend’s closet—namely that he’s been surveilling her coanchor’s apartment and tapped her phone.

Alex begins brokering her own alternative to Paul’s deal while still sleeping with the enemy. “All of a sudden, we were shooting a mystery thriller,” says Leder of the finale’s charged scenes between Aniston and Hamm. “To see Alex lay the trap, succeed, and the pain of finding out the truth about him was really fun dramatically. She goes through grief, pain, anger. There’s a death of that relationship. Jen did a magnificent job in her performance all season, but I would say especially in the discovery of the lie and in her ability to take the loss and make it a win, to save herself and to save UBA.”

While Alex keeps her scheming close to the vest, Mark Duplass’s Morning Show producer Chip delivers a Network-esque on-air monologue to blow the whistle on how Paul Marks plans to dismantle the news division. It was a speech that had long been brewing inside both the character and actor, says Leder. “He was jacked up and excited to do it,” she says of Duplass. “He actually came in guns ablazing. That was really fun to shoot and even more fun to edit because it was just hilarious.” On the show, Chip’s remarks unite both sides of the aisle: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweets that Chip’s remarks were “baller,” while Ted Cruz calls for an investigation into the pending Hyperion deal.

In turn, Alex formally proposes a cost-cutting merger between UBA and MBN, the rival network anchored by Julianna Margulies’s Laura Peterson. “It’s a chance to start over,” Alex tells the board. “To do things right for once, a true partnership.” That’s exactly what she won’t be finding in her romantic life—for now.

“Your heart takes you to places, [but] not necessarily where you want to go,” says Leder. “And it shows us how vulnerable we all are. In terms of Alex coming out of the pandemic, being alone, going through a divorce, her daughter chose the father, and now her work is her life, but something’s missing. Love is missing, and she finds it briefly.”

Now professionally severed, Paul and Alex get wistful about what could’ve been between them personally, as do Bradley and network head Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup). Eager to humiliate Cory on his way out the door, Paul plants a tabloid story that the CEO groomed Bradley and threatened to retaliate if she didn’t reciprocate his romantic feelings. When questioned by HR about the allegations. Bradley reveals that Cory once admitted that he loved her. Asked if she didn’t say it back because she feared professional fallout, she replies, “No, I was afraid of being with someone who saw me completely for who I was.”

Bradley and Cory come just shy of acknowledging their underlying feelings in a tearful conversation that feels like a full-on goodbye. “That was really a surprising scene in that there they were in the hallway naked,” Leder says. “Not literally naked, but bearing their souls in a very simple way. The scene really creeped up on us in terms of the emotionality that came out of these two characters admitting that they will miss each other and that they love each other without saying, ‘I love you.’ What’s really fascinating is what’s between the lines.”

When Bradley leaves, Cory is left to contend with an uncertain future. “I really want you to go further with this emotionally,” Leder says she told Crudup, who won an Emmy for his performance in the show’s first season. “I don’t want it to be a simple walk-away. I want it to be [that] you can’t move. You can barely hold it in.” What Crudup did next made Leder emotional herself. “He just kind of adjusted the painting, leaned against the wall and I was in tears at his ability to physically tell us what he was feeling,” she says.

One of the season’s most challenging sequences was recreating the January 6 insurrection to make it “feel authentic and dangerous and real,” says Leder. While reporting from the Capitol, Bradley sees her problematic brother Hal (Joe Tippett) assaulting a police officer. Although she captures his presence on her phone, Bradley later deletes that portion of the footage to protect her brother, and pulls Cory into her deceit as she leverages the footage to secure the nightly anchor job. At the start of the season finale, a flashback shows a young Bradley doing the opposite of covering; instead, she turns her father into the police for drunk driving, then has to live with her guilt.

“We see the consequences of what that has done to her and how it has caused her to keep [Hal’s] secret,” Leder explains. “If that event in her childhood had not happened, you kind of imagine what would she have done as an adult? She’s a journalist—her job is to put it out there and tell the truth. And so it was really a very well thought-out narrative. And Reese was absolutely tremendous in her abilities to go to that dark place with the secret she’s carrying.”

At season’s start, the words Trust and Truth flash over Alex and Bradley’s faces in advertisements for UBA. And while their personal desires wreaked havoc, it was professional duty—as advertised—that won out. Bradley turns herself over to the FBI in the name of journalistic ethics. And Alex saves the network, at the cost of her relationship with Paul. “Alex very much steps into her power,” Leder says. “She finds her truth, as heartbreaking and painful as it is, [and] does the right thing, as does Bradley.”

Given the breakneck speed with which The Morning Show plows through topical stories, Leder doesn’t feel any complacency heading into the series’ fourth season. “If I was bored, I’d be gone,” she says, “but I’m not because I love the stories we’re telling. I love the possibility of the new stories we’re going to be examining.” Amid the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, Leder isn’t able to place an exact timeline on the show’s return, but she’s thinking about what happens after “a journalist crosses the line. What are the options left in that person’s career?” And as for Alex Levy’s post-Marks period: “Hopefully she picks better men.”