‘The Morning Show’ production designer Nelson Coates on expanding home and work environments in Season 3 [Exclusive Video Interview]
In Season 2 of “The Morning Show,” production designer Nelson Coates was asked to expand the world of the Apple TV+ drama as it tackled the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, as well as the initial days of the pandemic in Italy and New York City, two of the earliest epicenters. In Season 3, he had the same assignment, but instead of having to recreate various international settings, he was tasked with expanding the corporate culture of UBA.
“I think one of the exciting things about the whole corporate culture… [is that] you see other shows, you see a lot of areas that you haven’t explored before,” Coates says of Season 3 during a recent webchat with Gold Derby (watch the full exclusive video interview above). “The first few seasons, I think, focus so much on the actual show within a show. And to expand the character development — not only are we seeing their other work environments, [but] you’re actually seeing a lot of the characters’ home environments in a way that you’ve never seen before — I think it’s really exciting how it’s expanded the show. You get to see the complexity, what’s really going on in home life and also just the interactions on a different level than you’ve ever seen before.”
Among the characters who experience a big change in their home environment is Bradley (Reese Witherspoon), who, after living in a hotel suite for the first two seasons, finally gets her own space in form of a swanky loft in the third. It’s a change that Coates had already propounded last season, but, for story purposes, it was important to keep Bradley and Cory (Billy Crudup) — who resides in the same hotel for the first two seasons — in close proximity to one another, the production designer notes. But with those limitations no longer in place in the third season, Coates seized the opportunity to incorporate more New York neighborhoods into the show.
“I really felt Bradley needed to have a space that was more industrial, more West Virginia throwback — that working person’s kind of space. And so I was looking for unusual buildings in my early scouting, and found a building that was built in 1884 that had these cool windows and was actually an old Mercantile Exchange floor,” he shares. “It was kind of vacant-feeling, and yet, old, New York rich, and the neighborhoods at night are incredibly quiet. And it gave Bradley a way to get away from all the other characters and all the other spaces. So I thought she’d be drawn to a space like this loft that I’ve created for her. But also, when you see it, it’s not really fully decorated; it feels a little vacant and empty, almost kind of like she is … [She] is just kind of lost in this big space, like she’s lost in New York and kind of like she’s lost in life.”
Perhaps it’s fitting that Cory, too, no longer resides in the hotel in Season 3. As shown in the fifth episode, “Love Island” — which flashes back to 2020 and early 2021 — the UBA CEO moves out of the city during the pandemic, purchasing an uber-luxurious mansion in the Hamptons. “One of the things that Cory has always been doing is trying to plant his flag, trying to prove his worth… And we figured, in that COVID space, when people were trying to find where they’re going to live and a lot of people did purchase houses — a lot of my New York friends went upstate, got lots of land, felt that they were going to just change and shift their life — that Cory would be attracted to a signature house, one that everyone would know and [would prompt people to] say, ‘Oh, you own that house?’ And so it was a really interesting challenge to try to find a location that we could modify, that could also feel like it’s back east.”
The location on which Coates and his team ultimately landed did in fact undergo modification in order to fit into the show. “In reality, we took off a whole story, we put it on the beach digitally, we changed all the trees to deciduous trees, as well as all the furnishings,” the production designer divulges. “But it was all done as if [Cory] is trying to prove. Like, he bought that house to have that upfront party [in the fourth episode, ‘The Green Light’]. You know that he’s just like, ‘Oh, come here, let’s see what I have!’ And yet, he forgets that there really is nothing about him in this space.”
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