Gretchen Morning ’92 didn’t plan on showrunning some of the biggest hits on the Discovery Channel. She didn’t plan on anything, in fact, and that’s made all the difference in her world.
By Mike Zimmerman; Photos by Matthew Brush, Spring 2025
How it started: “Wanna make a student film?”
How it’s going: “Wanna produce another hit for Warner Bros. Discovery?”
That’s the short version. The long version begins on what was then the Moravian College campus circa 1988. South Jersey girl arrives fresh and focused and utterly rudderless like a lot of us at age 18. You have dreams and a new reality in which to make them—maybe, possibly, who knows—come true.
“Honestly, I thought I was going to be a journalist,” she says. “I always loved nonfiction, and I loved people’s stories, but I ended up taking another route.”
The first stretch of that route was majoring in philosophy.
The next was multiple semesters abroad doing intensive language study.
In some ways she was living the liberal artist’s dream scenario—world traveler and philosophy major.
“Moravian allowed me to just explore without judgment,” she says. “Philosophy is very much questioning the human condition. For me it was just this way of looking at the world. It was a pathway into a mindset. And that can be useful.”
That was the real seed for her—not some declarative “I will be X” or “I want to accomplish Y” or even “get a load of Z’s starting salary.”
She realized through her studies and experiences that she had one of the sharpest weapons a lot of people never use: curiosity.
And that, folks, was the beginning for Gretchen Morning, Class of 1992.
Honestly, I thought I was going to be a journalist,” she says. “I always loved nonfiction, and I loved people’s stories, but I ended up taking another route.”
—Gretchen Morning ’92
This is really a story about how one person answered some commonly asked questions—the first being, What does one do with a philosophy major? Again, a short answer first: Anything one wants.
For Morning it really was about developing a seeker’s mindset. “I’m the kind of person who grew up not knowing what I wanted to do. I had a vague idea of it, and Moravian allowed me to explore interests until I found one that really suited me.”
She cites Moravian’s willingness to work with her “rather unconventional sort of undergraduate degree.” She studied abroad in Israel twice, fall semesters her sophomore and junior years, doing immersive language study as well as independent studies. Israel wasn’t even a preset destination. Morning is not Jewish and had no connection to the country at the time. “I just wanted to go really far away to a place I knew nothing about. Israel was so foreign to me.”
She lived on a kibbutz and started speaking Hebrew, and all through this she worked with the folks back at Colonial Hall to adapt what she was doing into degree requirements and course credit. “I always felt like they were working with me in terms of getting that really deep liberal arts foundation and allowing me to do it in my own way.”
It all goes back to the mindset, the curiosity. Really, those were her only guides. “At that age, you just want,” she says. “Maybe you’re not even sure what it is, but I think if you’re able to latch onto [the want], you wind up in interesting places. I mean, literally interesting places, but it also takes you into your own head: Where am I going? And where do you find yourself now? It’s not a clear path at all, but it’s a path.”
A Grand Legacy
Gretchen Morning ’92
One thing I forgot to mention in case it interests you is that I’m not the first member of my family to graduate from Moravian. My grandfather Joseph Schrader graduated in the 1950s, after WWII. My great-grandmother Evelyn Betge attended the girls’ school. And my grandmother Jeanne “Jinka” Schrader was a local artist. When she passed away in January of 2024, it was suggested that in lieu of flowers contributions be made to the Moravian University art department in her memory.
Right: Having majored in philosophy, Morning is still an avid reader.
Another common question: How does one break into the TV/movie biz?
The theme of the unclear path continues. After graduating in ’92, Morning decided on grad school—for philosophy. And doing it in Israel . . . in Hebrew. “I figured, I’m just going to keep with this for a while,” she says.
That’s as brutal as it sounds, it turns out. Morning’s mistake—seen only in hindsight, of course—was taking no time off between undergrad and graduate study. She graduated in May and was back in Israel in June. On top of that, she had to take degree- dependent courses the summer before her senior year, so she’d been in school essentially two years straight and then jumped into grad school right after graduation. “I was just exhausted,” she says.
She put her studies on hold and came back to the United States, settling in the tranquil and relaxing environment of New York City. She figured she’d get a job and “see what happens.” Fluent Hebrew got her a gig in the library at Yeshiva University “doing nothing that had to do with my degree,” she says.
One day her roommate said, “Hey, Gretchen, my cousin goes to NYU, and he’s making a film and needs an art director.” The roommate only mentioned it because she knew Morning could sew. “Somehow the fact that I knew how to sew meant that I could do art direction on a student film out of NYU,” Morning says. “And I was like . . . sure!”
Curiosity wins again. She says the film had a decent budget for a student film, plus New York City locations, so the experience was professional level (mostly). And something clicked.
“I just loved the energy of it,” she says. “I loved the fact that a group of people is working like an army, but you’re doing something super creative. I was just like, wow.” She now saw an opening on that hidden path. How to move forward? With a garbage-paying entry-level gig, of course. She found a night job logging videotapes for ABC News as part of Peter Jennings’s “20th Century Project,” a retrospective being prepared for the incoming Y2K.
Tedious? No. Transformative.
“I would go in at night and be there all by myself watching archival footage from all over the world,” she says. “Stuff that had never been seen before because it had been tucked away in archives. And again, it was one of those things where I was like, Oh my God, I didn’t know this existed. I’m seeing this footage and this world and learning these things I never knew.”
She was now hell-bent on trying anything that came her way in the major media world. And that led to another stepping stone Morning had no awareness of at the time. She took a job answering phones at a small production company. Not a dream job by any stretch, but she found herself staying because the owner was always open to people trying something that looked interesting to them. One day a delivery arrived at the office: a massive film-editing machine called an Avid.
“The owner was like, ‘This cost more than my first house,’” Morning says.
She started watching the pro editors work the Avid. Editing machines back then were far less complex than today’s systems, she says, so what she was seeing—alien at first—slowly came into shape for her. “I could sit in there and watch the keystrokes of the editors and kind of understand what was going on. And I was already fascinated by storytelling, so what I saw was just this fun, interesting world. I went on from there.”
It wasn’t long before she was a professional film/TV editor.
Executive producer of the hit TV series Naked and Afraid, Morning is not afraid to reveal her playful side.
Another common question, especially for film and TV fans: What exactly does an executive producer do?
There is no short answer, just a series of medium-long ones.
Sometimes executive producers own the production company behind the project. Steven Spielberg on Back to the Future. Reese Witherspoon on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition Reboot. Will Ferrell on Succession.
Sometimes executive producers have ownership or other crucial ties to the project. Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Mattel, on Barbie. George R. R. Martin on Game of Thrones and its spinoffs. Gillian Flynn on Gone Girl.
Sometimes executive producers gain the title through financial backing. This can lead to some strange bedfellows, like Eva Longoria providing $6 million in last-second funding to help John Wick get made.
And then there are the executive producers, like Morning, who are executives who produce things. If, say, Warner Bros. greenlights a film, a WB executive will be attached to the production to make sure all goes the way it should.
“Right now I work for Warner Bros. Discovery,” she says. “My group is very much the Discovery team. So we do mostly male programming, and it is Deadliest Catch, it’s Naked and Afraid. It’s all of those big Discovery brands.”
Morning is responsible for certain shows produced by outside production companies—a current example being Naked and Afraid. She’s there to oversee all aspects of the show, from preproduction and budgeting through casting and shooting. And her past editing expertise really comes into play when the team starts sending her rough and refined cuts for approval, all the way to “locking” a final version.
She works with everyone involved. She’s the hub holding all the spokes.
“When I’m on a production that’s working well,” she says, “I always envision it like a disco ball of greatness, all these lights. It’s a team of people who have all these different talents. And for whatever reason, we’re all meshing and everyone is amplifying each other. The best shows are made with this great combination of people and talents, and when everyone is firing on all cylinders.”
Morning rides her bike to work on most days.
All of it, the philosophy, the language immersion, the student filmmaking, the midnight video bingeing, the editing, and now the producing, is all one thing, the thing Morning mentioned before, the thing you feel in school but just can’t see yet.
She’s a storyteller.
That lightbulb finally clicked on while she logged long hours in dark editing bays. Editing is true storytelling, taking raw footage and making it propulsive, logical, and alive.
“I didn’t go to film school,” Morning says. “I didn’t go anywhere to learn how to be a producer or editor. I just fell into it and loved the minutiae of it. I loved the logic of it. I loved being able to create a story out of nothing. I learned very intimately how stories are constructed.”
She jokes, “I’m always the one who will give notes on cuts and say, ‘That makes no sense, man.’”
She took some larger storytelling opportunities when she was able, a big one being the 2011 documentary Gone, about a police officer mother traveling to Europe to investigate the suicide of her son. Morning wrote, produced, codirected, and, yes, edited the project.
“You get a little lonely being an editor,” she says. “I spent 15 years in a dark room with loud music playing. I was like, I think I’d like to see people out in daylight and get out into the world again. That transition was really invigorating because I was able to use everything I learned in this minutia sort of storytelling.”
Now she’s responsible for the storytelling of a major studio brand and knows what each show is and whom she’s trying to reach. And the fundamentals remain the same for her as they do for the folks working on other Warner projects on the same lot in Burbank.
“I’m in reality TV, which is often the redheaded stepchild of the nonfiction genres,” she says. “But for me, they’re all people pursuing something. Real people with real hopes and different lives, just so vastly different in every way. And I love meeting them and learning about what they do and why and how they got there. I love reality television. I do.”
Curiosity has led Morning along the path to her career success.
Morning has some advice for those at Moravian today or those who are about to be. She knows you’re driven and ambitious and ready to build a life. Just don’t be so certain about everything, especially your future.
Maybe while you’re digging into specifics like comp sci or accounting or psychology, you’re simultaneously feeling a little scared of it, or uncertain, or just plain “I really and truly have no idea if this is what I want. ” That’s okay. Morning didn’t have a plan B because she was improvising the entire time. In literal terms she majored in philosophy and immersive language learning and foreign travel, but in practical terms, she majored in curiosity.
In fact, she says having a super-specific career goal while in college may even be limiting. It can guide you, for sure, but it can also confine you if you’re afraid of being outside the boundaries of that path. Detours can lead to amazing places, people, and experiences. When someone asks you to art-direct their student film, for example, are you in a position to say yes?
Morning has some advice for those at Moravian today or those who are about to be. She knows you’re driven and ambitious and ready to build a life. Just don’t be so certain about everything, especially your future.
“It’s really hard to lay out a life,” she says. “You can limit yourself with your expectations. You only see yourself in one way doing one thing, and it might not be the thing that you’re meant to be.”
Morning uses her own industry as a prime example—all those creative kids dying to be film directors or performers or writers. You get locked into a dream. “I never dreamt of being Spielberg. My aspirations were always driven by, again, curiosity. I always went from project to project, being driven by my curiosity and my love of what I was doing. I just kept on moving forward without really worrying about my future.
“One thing social media has done is it makes us feel like we have to follow certain pathways to get to a point. And I think sometimes you’re better off just being oblivious. Know what I mean? Where you’re just like, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to try it and not try to game it all out. Not try to know what step 10 is going to be. If you can keep the goal in mind, you have a North Star, but the way there might be unexpected, and that’s okay. A lot of magic can happen along the way.”
The executive producer of Naked and Afraid with a high-protein meal foraged from the wild
From All Sides
Gretchen Morning has worked the stories for television shows from every angle.
Executive Producer
Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch, 2021–2024
Game Changers, 2024
Sin City Tow, 2024
Naked and Afraid, 2022
Million Dollar Wheels, 2022
Dino Hunters, 2021
Street Outlaws: Gone Girl, 2021
Expedition: Back to the Future, 2021
Small Town Throwdown, 2020
Race Night at Bowman Gray, 2018
Writer/Producer
Gone, 2011 (also director and editor)
Dr. G: Medical Examiner, 2004–2009
Editor
Fast n’ Loud, 2012–2016
Misfit Garage, 2014
Hoarding: Buried Alive, 2010–2014
Wicked Tuna, 2012
This Week in History, 2000–2003
History’s Lost & Found, 1999–2005
On Location
Morning on location (left to right): in Guyana for Naked and Afraid, in the jungles of Colombia, at the site of the show Race Night at Bowman Gray, for the series Dino Hunters, wearing her remote work shoes.
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