How ‘The Morning Show’ and ‘The Girls on the Bus’ took notes from Fox News

After “The Morning Show” began its third season last fall, showrunner Charlotte Stoudt received a text message from “a very well-known host on a national news network” with some constructive criticism.

This unnamed person had seen Episode 3, in which June Diane Raphael makes her debut as an anchor of Eagle News, a fictional conservative news network reporting on an internal scandal at UBA, the network that employs Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon’s characters. With a smile on her face, Raphael’s presenter reads incriminating emails from the chairman of the UBA (Holland Taylor). While she enjoys this news more than an objective reporter probably should, she doesn’t say anything inaccurate. That’s what Stoudt’s mysterious texter objected to: “She doesn’t tell enough lies,” they texted her.

“It was a great moment,” says Stoudt Variety. “I never thought anyone would accuse me of being too nice to Fox News.”

While Eagle News isn’t exactly Fox News, Stoudt appreciates the response, good or bad, because creating fake news is an art — not the kind that screws with voters’ minds every day, but rather the fictional news networks on TV. series. In this case, Eagle News is a thinly veiled stand-in for right-wing networks like Fox News. But legally, “The Morning Show” can’t speak for that real entity, even when it comes to fictional matters, so it creates its own version.

“It just felt like we wanted to have a Greek choir to comment on how messed up UBA has been this season,” Stoudt says. “You want the mean girl in high school to shine the least sympathetic light on everything you do, so I think that was the energy we were going for.”

Raphael makes only a fleeting appearance in Season 3 of “The Morning Show,” returning in the season finale with buzzwords like “woke” paired with a photo of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — features of Fox News’ reporting that would be more recognizable to those van Stoudt. mysterious text. But Max’s new political drama “The Girls on the Bus” had a much bigger mission in creating its own fake news network.

The series is based on Amy Chozick’s book, “Chasing Hillary,” which chronicles her experiences covering Hillary Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 presidential runs for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, respectively. None of the real people she encountered on the campaign trail appear in the show. Instead, a generic lineup of Democratic presidential candidates is covered by roving reporters, including Kimberlyn (Christina Elmore), a black conservative who works for Liberty Direct News, another fictional Fox News stand-in.

Chozick, who served as executive producer of the series, says that because Liberty Direct News is so prominent in the series, they had to build it from the ground up, from the color scheme to the journalistic tone. But the first major decision was choosing a name, for which she polled her friends who had appeared on networks like Fox.

“I’ve always liked Liberty News; it just has a patriotic quality,” Chozick says. “But the legal department told us that there actually is something called Liberty News. So we added Liberty Direct News, and I like the ‘direct’ part of it. Sometimes regulatory approvals lead to better names.”

In ‘The Morning Show’, Raphael’s character is seen alone behind the anchor desk. But Kimberlyn is one of the four leads of “The Girls on the Bus,” and as such she had to embody the visual cues of right-wing news media as she went out into the world, right down to her clothing – inspiration for this came from real Fox personalities like Laura Ingraham.

“The colors were very important,” she says. “It had to be clear. We really wanted those bright poppy colors. And the colors and the costumes were part of Kimberlyn’s whole story. Eventually you see the skirts getting shorter and the necklines lower, and some of her growing discomfort with the network is actually reflected in the clothes.”

While Kimberlyn is pounding the pavement on the campaign trail, she’s occasionally in the studio of Liberty Direct News, for which production designer Curt Beech has built multiple sets with an appropriate splash of red, white and blue. For those scenes, Chozick drew from her own experiences appearing as a commentator on Fox News.

“They were really caked on the makeup, lashes and toner when I was there,” she says. “I joked with the lady, ‘Are you going to make me a blonde?’ and she said, completely deadpan, “No, we don’t have time.” So there’s definitely an aesthetic to it.”

In reporting, Liberty segments are noticeably more bombastic and energetic, and are “in stark contrast to what the other journalists on the bus are doing,” says Chozick. While she admits they went overboard with some characterizations of Kimberlyn’s colleagues at Liberty, they showed restraint in other ways.

“I think our freedom is in jeopardy and they clearly don’t like the Democrats,” she says. “But because we don’t live in a real political landscape, I don’t think there are any lame lies or attempts to foment insurrection. The things people might say about right-wing media in the real world, that’s not the kind of fictional world we’ve created.”

Likewise, Stoudt says they haven’t turned to Eagle News for commentary on issues of national importance in the world of “The Morning Show,” but rather mudslinging in the media.

“June brings a kind of lightness to it,” she says. “Anyone can watch Fox News if they want and decide if it’s for them, but I didn’t want to take the position that these people are horrible and humorless. It just didn’t seem like the right way to touch it, so I liked the idea of ​​making her attractive in a strange way.

If anything, it reminds us why people watch the real thing.

“It’s kind of a show,” says Chozick. “When Kimberlyn calls on our presenters, Nellie and Mike, they generate a kind of anger, but behind the scenes they admit that they do it for the ratings. With Liberty we wanted to portray this kind of theatre.”