When the fourth season of The Morning Show drops on Apple TV+ next week, audiences will catch up with Jennifer Aniston‘s Alex Levy and Reese Witherspoon‘s Bradley Jackson almost two years after the events of season three, with a time jump into early 2024.

For a show that regularly hits on of-the-moment topics like the #MeToo movement and COVID-19 pandemic, viewers may expect this season to address the 2024 presidential election — but that will not be the case.

At the show’s New York premiere on Tuesday, director and executive producer Mimi Leder told The Hollywood Reporter, “We did not touch the election — this season ends right before the election. Our show is not about elections; our show is about the world, about AI, about deepfakes, about environmental tragedies. It’s about democracy. It’s about journalists in jeopardy, journalists under threat, and our main theme this season is trust — who can you trust?”

Showrunner Charlotte Stoudt added that with the season set in the spring of 2024 when the presidential race was still between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, “We try to go at it sideways. We don’t really have, directly, an election story, but we do touch on the idea of: Why were two older white men running for president. Why do we still need daddy?”

There are a few moments that reference the political climate at that time, though, as then-President Biden makes a brief appearance in season four via a media clip, and is mentioned as part of a storyline involving Alex Levy, who is now steering the season three finale merger between The Morning Show‘s parent company and their rival media company to create the newly formed UBN. Big tech, AI, fringe media, employment and reproductive rights are also election-related topics tackled this year.

Co-star Nestor Carbonell explained, “I think this season, there was less of an emphasis on the political side and more on the social implications of these things. There are politics but they’re politics within the station, less so on the political election.”

On top of the already starry cast of Aniston, Witherspoon, Billy Crudup, Jon Hamm, Mark Duplass and Karen Pittman, season four welcomes new additions Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, William Jackson Harper and Boyd Holbrook.

But even with that supersized cast, Witherspoon promised “a lot more” moments between her and Aniston’s characters — after they were in largely separate storylines in season three, and left off with a cliffhanger that set them even further apart. “You’re going to see Alex and Bradley from the very beginning, almost in a little tension too. They’re maybe not as friendly as they were last season,” she teased.

The Morning Show season four starts streaming Sept. 17 on Apple TV+.

Neha Joy and Jackie Strause contributed to this report.