Steve Carell will return to TV for Apple’s morning news drama

By Rick Marshall October 24, 2018

Steve Carell spent seven seasons playing bumbling, paper-pushing manager Michael Scott on The Office, and now the actor is returning to television after a seven-year absence — and one Academy Award nomination — for an upcoming scripted series produced by Apple that explores the world of morning news shows.

The still-untitled series will cast Carell as Mitch Kessler, a morning show anchor who is “struggling to maintain relevance in a changing media landscape,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. The show is based on Brian Stelter’s novel Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, and already has a two-season, 20-episode order from Apple.

Joining Carell in co-starring roles will be Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, with the series also marking the first regular TV role for Aniston since she co-starred in NBC’s wildly popular sitcom Friends. Witherspoon made her TV debut in 2017 with a regular role in Big Little Lies, which she also executive produced. Aniston and Witherspoon will both serve as executive producers on the series.

Filming on the series is expected to begin in the last week of October in Los Angeles, but it’s still unknown how or when Apple plans to air any of the scripted TV series the company is developing.

Carell’s return to TV follows a seven-year period that had him venture outside the comedic roles he was known for while working on The Office. His performance in 2014’s Foxcatcher earned him an Academy Award nomination as a lead actor ( he lost to The Theory of Everything star Eddie Redmayne), while subsequent roles in 2015’s The Big Short and 2017’s Last Flag Flying earned him even more critical acclaim as a dramatic actor. He plays a starring role in this year’s drama Beautiful Boy alongside another Oscar nominee, Timothée Chalamet.

The morning news drama is one of several projects currently in development for Apple that also include an adaptation of sci-fi author Isaac Asimov’s acclaimed Foundation series, a biopic of NBA star Kevin Durant, and a series written and directed by Oscar-winning Whiplash and La La Land filmmaker Damien Chazelle, whose film First Man recently hit theaters.

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