Editor’s note: Deadline’s It Starts on the Page features standout drama series scripts in 2026 Emmy contention.

Season 4 of The Morning Show waded into several issues including AI deepfakes, freedom of speech and environmental justice. Some staffers faced fallout, like Greta Lee’s Stella and Nicole Beharie’s Chris, and a full shakeup seems to be in store ahead of Season 5, which is now in production. Each episode built toward a tense separation and relieving reunion between the show’s two main leads — Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon).

Written by Sharon Hoffman and Micah Schraft and directed by Miguel Arteta, episode 408, titled “The Parent Trap” sees Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) and Alex confront their father and mother, played, respectively, by Jeremy Irons and Lindsay Duncan.

Alex gets into a heated discussion with her college professor father Martin Levy (Irons) about what happened to her mother.

Cory’s mother Martha (Duncan), meanwhile, is looking into options for assisted suicide. He drops everything to get to her house to try and talk her out of it, but there’s only so much he can do.

Below, find the script for “The Parent Trap,” written by Hoffman and Schraft, with an introduction by The Morning Show showrunner Charlotte Stoudt, in which she explains how the episode fits into Season 4’s theme and reveals the inspiration for weaving the two stories about parents together and how the emotional scenes between Aniston and Irons and Crudup and Duncan were filmed.

Season 4 of The Morning Show is about reckoning with the past.

I wanted to explore how Alex became Alex. How did she grow up? Who were her parents? Clearly there’s no mother in the picture, so Alex grew up around all this masculine energy. We imagined this brilliant, hyper-articulate, ferociously charming, narcissistic father. And Jeremy Irons is so delicious he can get away with murder.

I really loved the Season 3 face-off between Cory and his mother, Martha, played by the wonderful Lindsay Duncan. As we worked on Season 4, I read an op-ed in the Times about someone grappling with a request to attend a friend’s suicide. We started thinking — what would happen if Martha called Cory to say she was ending her life that day? Cory is suddenly facing the pitch of his life: Can he convince his mother to stay alive?

We decided to combine these two stories into an episode about parents. The powerful shadow they cast over our lives. Sharon Hoffman and Micah Schraft are both writers who balance emotional truth with comedy. The episode starts as a farce and becomes a tragedy. Alex and her father’s story begins almost as slapstick. When Jeremy yells “Alexannnndra!,” you get Alex’s entire childhood in one word.

Miguel Arteta, the director, shot the Alex-Martin confrontation scene without a rehearsal. He just turned on the camera and said “Go,” which gave the whole scene a live-wire feel. The actors hadn’t set any blocking. They just found it on their feet. Which was what the scene was about — an impromptu emotional boxing match.

For me the center of that scene is the question Alex asks her father: “Do you know how badly I wanted to be somebody you could love?” It’s such a naked question, so raw. All of our deepest questions are raw and embarrassing and exposing. Jen was basically channeling in that scene. She really opened a vein.

So did Billy. There is a shot of Cory leaning against Martha on a garden bench, bathed in blue light. His grief is so palpable you feel it in your bones.

We debated what Cory would do afterward. At one point we had Cory at an orgy, aka a “flesh puddle.” In the end Sharon and Micah landed on something more intimate. Cory and Celine do drugs, dance to Devo, and when he’s worn himself out, Cory gives a eulogy for his childhood, a world to which he can never return: “When I thought my parents were embarrassing, knew everything, and would always be around.”

I’m grateful to Sharon and Micah, to our incredible cast, and to Miguel Arteta for creating this episode. I came on to The Morning Show in Season 3 with no idea how to write it. I discovered that the show can hold so many things. There is something immensely cathartic about scripting the most difficult experiences of our lives, alongside the most ridiculous. They live side by side.

Read the script below.