Greta Lee exits The Morning Show: Stella’s AI disaster

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers for Episode 6 of Season 4 of “Ifthen” The Morning Show, 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 Morning Show’s fourth season, the tech genius turned news department leader at UBN played by Greta Lee watched the carefully curated life she had quickly built for herself crumble on top of her — in front of 200 journalists, her boss Céline (Marion Cotillard), and the rest of the world.

“For me, this was the moment before the explosion,” Lee says. diverse. “It’s all the centrifugal force that’s built up after years and years of having to operate a certain way. It’s become very smart since the day it first arrived, but I think it’s clear — or it was clear to me — that it’s not sustainable.”

It’s been one stumble after another this season for the woman who was first introduced to audiences in Season 2 as a problem solver, selling her tech company and carving out a place for herself at a leading news network where women don’t often find themselves in the C-Suite. But this season, Stella is putting it all on the line for her supposedly groundbreaking AI program (considering this will happen in the spring of 2024) that can translate popular UBN announcers into any language ahead of the network’s global coverage of the Paris Olympics. But in the sixth episode, Stella goes through a crisis of awareness due to her decision not to promote her friend Mia (Karen Bateman) due to the pressure she is exposed to to raise the level of her male counterpart. Mia’s defiant return in which she declares Stella an enemy of the progress she has long championed; Her ongoing relationship with Miles (Aaron Pierre), Celine’s husband, leaves Stella adrift.

In her voiceover throughout the episode, she laments that she succumbed to the toxic pull of her “inner straight white man” by doing what he would do — “I fell into bed with the only person who could blow up his life.” Although Miles isn’t the only thing putting pressure on the bomber, the situation doesn’t help when she and Celine take the stage to present their ambitious plan to cover the Olympics to the media. Hoping to distract the headline-hungry press from the network’s various other scandals, Stella gives a demonstration of her artificial intelligence program, using her manufactured image, despite telling Selene that she is not ready. Unfortunately, her worst fears come true when not only does something go wrong on stage, but all the hurtful, racist, damned things Stella (aka herself) talked about the night before resurfaces in the digital age version of taking a look in the mirror and asking if you like what you see.

A PR nightmare leaves Stella no choice but to resign. She initially retreats into Miles’ arms, and they decide to run away together to Naples. But when she arrives at the airport with a hopeful smile and more time on her hands than usual, he sends her a simple “I’m sorry” text. She got on the plane anyway, and even Lee doesn’t know what awaits her on the other side.

“This is the end for her, as far as I know,” Lee says, confirming her exit, at least from season four. “But of course, since the show is insightful and a direct commentary on what’s going on, I would love to see what kind of world would exist where she returns, and what she might have to say.”

However, Stella’s decline was not a downward spiral in Season 4. Lee is in the camp whose downfall (at least professionally) began last season when she endured a painful lunch with a pair of corporate investors. In order to get their support and money, they force her to order a waitress (also a woman of color) to lick a spilled drink off the table to prove that she is one of the boys. She tells me that Stella never recovered from having her ideals irrevocably compromised in that moment.

“But I hope she will now have the opportunity to do so,” she adds. “I think that’s part of the problem for her. It’s like she hasn’t had the opportunity to reflect or forgive or even, in many ways, acknowledge in a bigger way some of the things that she’s endured and done in order to get to where she is. So I hope she does that on a beach somewhere.”

The implosion of Stella’s image, thanks to her artificial intelligence, is twofold. It revealed her deep concerns about the ways in which she contributed to the company’s stunting of progress for people and women of color at the network (“You’re not one of us — and you never were,” Mia had earlier chided her for this). But her AI is also talking about her relationship with Miles – right in front of Selene. The French CEO uses it to get Stella out immediately, corporately speaking.

The AI ​​version of Stella introduced in the series wasn’t the leap forward in technology that Hollywood fears and reviles, but rather just another task handed to Lee this season.

“In the beginning, I had to read opposite myself,” she says of the filming process. “The reality of what we’re doing is that we’re showing technology that’s evolving as we speak. You see all the risks there are, and how dangerous it can be if those barriers aren’t in place. So when I was doing it, it was a mess. I was doing a combination of reading with someone on the script, and then also a photo of myself that wasn’t exactly like the final product. And then I go back and see what they produced and I feel completely weird about it — because I’m trying Getting any kind of timing, comedic or dramatic, while unconsciously acting yourself out is very strange.

But she couldn’t play by herself. Lee and the creative team worked to find ways to make the AI ​​technologically perfect, but also make sure that the AI’s flaws were still on full display.

“We talked at length about how many blinks we would do, and how many blinks were in the wrong place, and how funny that was, because there are limits to avatars,” she says. “That’s what’s so weird about them, and why, arguably, they’ll never be good human beings. There are some qualities that are impossible to master. So, yeah, we got to play with a lot of that, and we had a lot of laughs.”

When she is betrayed because of her appearance, Stella can only look out at a shocked audience, and happens to find a familiar – albeit unfriendly – ​​face among them. Mia watches from the nosebleed seats, and Stella has to process that moment through her as well. The two have been each other’s advocates over the past two seasons, and this season Stella vowed to go to Mia for the news director position. But when she steps back from that to further her ambition with AI and the Net, Mia becomes the embodiment of Stella’s failures, one that haunts this scene like the specter of what could have been.

“That moment was so intense because she knew there was betrayal between them, the kind you can’t come back from,” she tells me. “For each of them, for a long time, the option to fail was something that never existed. It just wasn’t possible. So to experience the pinnacle of failure in such a public way and to have Mia witness to that, it’s almost too much. That exchange, that silent exchange across that room, is like a hundred words said between them.”

Throughout the entire episode, Mia, Miles, and Celine somehow tell Stella why her decisions led to failure. With Miles in particular, he berates her for choosing a man she can never truly have, despite their impassioned pleas to choose each other over his comfortable life and her career. However, his rejection of her at the airport in fulfillment of said plan may be the deepest cut in Stella’s very bad day. She is left broken, unsure whether she should board the plane or try to repair the wreckage in its wake.

In the final scene, Lee hesitates for a moment before letting Stella choose.

“I think it’s a whole new sensation that you’ve literally never experienced before,” she says. “It’s a lot to process in just a few moments. When she realizes Miles’s not coming, she takes stock and realizes she has nothing. But the surprising thing for her and for someone like her is in that moment when she realizes she has nothing, it kind of means she’s got Everything. That is a gift of the terrible circumstances that befell her. It’s really free. I think that step toward the plane is the scariest thing she’s probably ever done in her life.

Don’t cry for Stella so much. Let’s not forget that she sold her tech company for hundreds of millions, and had a lot of zeros in her paycheck before exiting the remaining stage at UBN. So her next chapter will be very well funded, even if her personal and professional life are a mess. But Stella has proven to be nothing if not resilient. The big question now is whether she will return to the show, as many (maybe many?) former UBN executives have done. Lee says she loves working with “The Morning Show” crew, and is always excited to spar with them over media jargon. But on the contrary, she is also very protective of Stella and her journey, and doesn’t think she should come back anytime soon.

“When I think about her and what I want for her, I don’t know if there is a place for her yet,” she tells me. “I think the world has to change a little to make room for her the way I want to see her. Otherwise we’ll just see her as a slave to this company. Being a slave to unfulfilled desires, and I don’t want that for her.”

Considering that “The Morning Show” has been around for almost a year and shifting behind our timeline, audiences may be waiting a long time for our current world to become worthy of Stella Buck’s resurrection. Until then, Lee hopes to spend some of those millions somewhere outside the 24-hour news cycle.

“I want her to be completely surprised by what happens to her,” Lee says. “If she comes back, I want her to be like Matthew McConaughey as the beach bum, with the bongos and the hair. I want her to be roughed up a little bit by life in the real world. Just to feed her soul a little bit, and become a person. Because I really think that from that place maybe she’ll have something genius to offer.”

But for those who watched the episode and thought for a moment that Stella suddenly died off-screen, you’re not alone. When Alex (Jennifer Aniston) announced Stella’s resignation on air, the transcript of her reflection on her career at UBN seemed so much like a eulogy, that some people even mentioned it to Lee.

“Jane was crying when she came to sit on my last day,” Lee says. “He was so sweet, Mimi [Leder] He had such beautiful words that day. We’re a family, so it was really emotional. But you’re not alone if you think that was a eulogy. Some of the other people on our crew were like, “This is a eulogy.” What is happening?'”