Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers for “The Morning Show,” Season 4, Episode 6, “If Then,” now streaming on Apple TV.
Ladies and gentlemen, Stella Buck has left the building. And the country. And the show.
In the sixth episode of the fourth season of “The Morning Show,” Greta Lee’s tech genius-turned-head of UBN’s news department watches the carefully managed, rapidly rising life she built for herself come crashing down in front of 200 journalists, her boss Celine (Marion Cotillard), and the rest of the world.
“For me, this was the moment before the explosion,” Lee told Variety. “It’s all about centrifugal forces that have built up after years and years of having to operate a certain way. She’s been pretty savvy since the day she first arrived, but I think it’s clear, or it was clear to me, that it’s not sustainable.”
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This season has been one setback after another for the woman who was first introduced to viewers in Season 2 as an intimidating problem-solver who sold her technology business and carved out a place for herself at a major news network with few women in the C-suite. But this season, Stella has bet everything on a supposedly groundbreaking AI program that can translate UBN’s popular anchors into any language (which, mind you, will be implemented in spring 2024) ahead of UBN’s worldwide broadcast of the Paris Olympics. However, in episode 6, Stella has a crisis of consciousness over her decision not to promote her friend Mia (Karen Pittman) due to the pressure of promoting her male counterpart. Mia defiantly returns, declaring Stella an enemy of the very progress she has long championed. And Stella’s affair with Celine’s husband Miles (Aaron Pierre) leaves her adrift.
In a voiceover that runs throughout the episode, she laments that she gave in to the toxic temptations of her “inner straight white man” and did what he would have done. Miles isn’t the only one pressuring the Prime Minister, but things don’t help when she and Celine take to the stage to announce their ambitious Olympic coverage plans to the media. Despite telling Celine that she wasn’t ready yet, Stella deployed a demonstration of her AI program using images she created herself, hoping to distract the headline-hungry press from the network’s various other scandals. Unfortunately, her worst fears come true when it not only malfunctions on stage, but also regurgitates all the hurtful, racist, abhorrent words that Stella (aka herself) was speaking the night before in a digital age version of herself looking in the mirror and asking if she liked what she saw.
A PR nightmare forced Stella to resign. She first runs into Miles’ arms, and the two decide to run away together to Naples. But when she arrived at the airport with a hopeful smile and more time to spare than usual, he texted her a simple, “I’m sorry.” She gets on the plane anyway, but Lee has no idea what’s waiting for her on the other side.
“As far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of her,” Lee said, confirming her departure from season four at least. “But of course, this show is so prescient and so direct commentary on what’s going on that I’d love to see what kind of world exists where she comes back and what she would say.”
However, Stella’s downfall was not a spiral included in season four. Lee is in the camp whose downfall (at least professionally) began last season when he endured an excruciating lunch with two slimy corporate investors. To gain their support and money, they made her order the waitress (also a woman of color) to lick spilled drinks from the table to prove she was one of the boys. Lee said Stella irrevocably compromised her ideals in that moment and never recovered.
“But I hope she gets a chance,” she added. “I think that’s part of her problem. It’s like she hasn’t had a chance to reflect or forgive or even acknowledge in a larger sense in many ways what she endured and did to get to this point. So I hope she’s on a beach somewhere.”
The collapse of Stella’s image is literally twofold, thanks to her own AI. This exposed her own deep concerns about how she had contributed to inhibiting the advancement of people of color and women within the network (Mia had previously chided her for this, saying, “You’re not one of us. You never were.”). But her AI also talks about her relationship with Miles right in front of Celine. The French CEO uses this to immediately eliminate Stella, corporately speaking.
The AI version of Stella introduced in the series wasn’t the technological breakthrough that Hollywood feared and decried, but rather was just another mission for Lee this season.
“At first I had to read the opposite of me,” she says of the filming process. “The reality of what we’re doing is we’re showing a technology that’s evolving as we speak. You see all the pitfalls of it, and you see how dangerous it can be if you don’t have guardrails in place. I was reading the script with someone and then putting together my own images that didn’t quite make it into the final product. Then I went back and looked at what they had produced and it was completely strange to me because I was trying to create some kind of comedy. Or expressing yourself in a dramatic, emotionless way is very strange. ”
But she just couldn’t play herself. Lee and his creative team worked hard to find a way to make the AI technically perfect, but they also found a way to make the AI’s imperfections fully visible.
“Avatar has limitations, so we had a long conversation about how many times you blink, how funny it is to blink in the wrong place, and how funny that is,” she says. “That’s what’s so creepy about them, and definitely why they’re never good people. There’s a certain quality that’s impossible to discern. So, yeah, we got to play with that a lot, and we had a lot of laughs.”
When Stella is betrayed by her likeness, she can only look on at the shocked audience, and accidentally spots a familiar – if not friendly – face among them. Mia watches from her nosebleed seat, and Stella has to take in the moment through her. The two have championed each other for the past two seasons, and this season Stella vowed to run for Mia’s news director position. But when she recantes that statement to further her own AI and network ambitions, Mia becomes the embodiment of Stella’s failures, haunting the scene like a ghost of what could have been.
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“That moment was so fulfilling because she knew there was a betrayal between them and she would never recover from it,” Lee says. “For each of them, and for a long time, failure was simply not an option. As impossible as it was, to experience the pinnacle of failure so publicly, and for Mia to be a witness to it, is excruciating. That wordless exchange across that room is like 100 words exchanged between the two of them.”
Throughout the episode, Mia, Miles, and Celine all told Stella in one way or another why her decisions were leading to failure. Regarding Miles in particular, he admonishes her for choosing a man she cannot truly have, despite their fervent pleas to choose each other over a comfortable life and her own career. But his rejection of her at the airport when carrying out that plan may be Stella’s deepest wound on her worst, worst day. She is left hurt and wondering whether to still get on the plane or try to repair the wreckage.
In the final scene, Lee hesitates for a moment before letting Stella make her choice.
“I think it’s a completely new feeling that she’s literally never experienced before,” she says. “There’s a lot to process in a matter of seconds. When she realizes Miles isn’t coming, she looks at herself and realizes she doesn’t have anything. But the amazing thing for her and people like her is that she doesn’t have anything. That’s the moment she realizes that, in a way, she’s got everything. She’s really free. That step towards the plane is probably the scariest thing she’s ever done in her life. ”
Please don’t cry too much for Stella. Let’s not forget that she sold her technology company for hundreds of millions of dollars and was left with a bunch of zeros in her paycheck before stepping off the stage at UBN. So even if her personal and professional life is thrown into turmoil, her next chapter will be extremely well-funded. But Stella has proven that she is not resilient. The big question now is whether she will return to the show, as many (perhaps too many?) former UBN executives have done. Lee said she loves working with “The Morning Show” ensemble and always looks forward to sparring with them about media terminology. But on the contrary, she is very protective of Stella and her journey and sees no need to come back any time soon.
“When I think about her and what I want for her, I don’t know if there’s still a place for her,” Lee says. “I think the world needs to change a little bit more to make room for her in the way that I want to see her. Otherwise, we’re just going to see her become a slave to this company, a slave to unfulfilled desires, and I don’t want that for her.”
Given that “The Morning Show” has been around for about a year and is changing behind our own timeline, viewers may be waiting a long time for the current world to be suitable for the return of Stella Buck. Until then, Lee wants to spend some of those millions far away from the 24-hour news cycle.
“I want her to be completely surprised by what’s there,” Lee says. “If she were to come back, I want her to be like Matthew McConaughey, the beach guy with the bongos and the hair. I want her to get a little rough in real life, just to feed her soul a little bit and be a person, because I really think she might have something original to offer from that place.”
But if you watched the episode and momentarily wondered if Stella suddenly died off-screen, you’re not alone. When Alex (Jennifer Aniston) announced Stella’s resignation on air, some even mentioned it to Lee, as the script, which looked back on her career at UBN, sounded so eulogy-like.
“Jen was crying when she came on set on my last day,” Lee says. “It was such a kind word. Mimi (Reeder) said something so beautiful that day. It was really emotional because we are family. But you’re not the only one who thought this was a memorial. Some of the other guys on our crew were like, ‘This is a memorial. What’s going on?’