Fall TV Preview 2025: A League of Their Own

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“So now,” says Stoudt, “those women have a chance to do it differently from [the men] who ran everything for years. The questions is, can they do better? Can they guide the ship in a world where everyone is leaning into the elusive nature of AI, conspiracy theories, and fake news, whether from the White House or Russian bots? “

From the beginning, the newsroom has to tackle the fog of disinformation. It all starts when a deep fake could take both Alex and the network down. After interviewing a young Iranian Olympic fencer live on air, the girl’s father slips Alex a note that says, “We want to defect.” In front of an Iranian government minder, no less. “Alex is torn,” says Stroudt. “The network did everything to get the Olympics, overextending themselves with bank loans. Should she be compassionate and take this huge risk to help them? Alex may be a narcissist, but deep down she’s a righteous person.” (We’ll learn more about Alex when her self-satisfied professor father Martin Levy, played by Jeremy Irons, appears.)

Unfortunately, a deep fake starts spreading on social media and TV with Alex talking about planning the defection of the girl, whose father turns out to be a nuclear scientist. That lie could not only ruin Alex’s career but wreak havoc at the network and even cause trouble in the White House.

There’s more chaos to come, of course. Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup), UBA’s former CEO who was falsely accused of sexual harassment, is struggling as a film producer and starts begging old and new friends including Stella, his protégé, and Celine’s husband artist Miles Allam (Aaron Pierre), for loans. While doing that, he gets unexpectedly lucky with tawdry information that could win him a well-paid perch at UBA-NBN.

Also: Celine makes some decision about what to do when she learns about a huge personal betrayal by a colleague, and Stella, once a brilliant coder and a rebel, “starts to become deeply, deeply ambivalent about having this job,” Stoudt reveals. “Part of her longs to get out, perhaps with a person with whom she can be herself.”

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Meanwhile, Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), who had to give up her news anchor job at UBA after she had deleted video of her brother Hal’s (Joe Tippett) violence during the January 6 insurrection, was last seen giving herself up to the FBI with her close friend Alex at her side. She managed to keep out of jail and her name out of the news, when she offered to give information to the Feds about Alex’s old beau, billionaire tech god Paul Marx (Jon Hamm, who will show up again this season).

Bradley is now teaching journalism back home in West Virginia, but a whistle-blower’s messages about a deadly cover-up of an industrial explosion that could implicate UBA gets her back into the reporting game. With the FBI’s permission, she takes off to NYC to find her source and connect again with Alex.

Though their relationship can be “pretty bumpy,” notes Stroudt, “the fundamental center of the show really is these two women’s impact on each other, kind of like Wicked, where they ideally change each other for good.” But fans of the characters’ earnest misadventures might hope not too good.

The Morning Show, Season 4 Premiere, Wednesday, September 17, Apple TV+