The Morning Show Recap: Burn It Down
Oh, Stella Bak, what have you done? It feels devastatingly full circle that Stella’s career at UBN began with Cory Ellison telling her to take the head of news job and burn it all down, and it ends with her doing exactly that, except the only real victim here is herself. (I mean, an AI CEO going racist on main can’t be great for shareholders, but that will bounce back.) The moment The Morning Show introduced AI in the season premiere, you knew it was going to blow up in someone’s face. I just did not ever think it would blow up this spectacularly.
Let’s be clear, it’s not that Stella deserves to be so utterly humiliated on an international stage and her entire life imploded in the span of five minutes while standing next to Kara Swisher. She’s been treated like shit by a whole bunch of powerful people in her life. And that thing about her assuming her father was disappointed she couldn’t even pull off a suicide correctly when she tried to kill herself during the Paul Marks debacle? Chilling. Still, she has done some terrible things and time and again has shown herself to be out for No. 1. When she meets with Mia and Marcus to discuss Chris’s future at UBN since all Chris’s big interview on Bro Hartman’s show did was make people love her more and she has a lot of leverage as far as negotiating her contract goes, it seems like Stella won’t be giving in to any of Mia’s demands for Chris out of pure spite.
Mia (and Chris) are well aware that Stella somehow scrounged up enough money to make a lucrative deal with Cory Ellison, of all people. And she also knows that Alex Levy has co-anchor approval. Still, Stella refuses to budge; regardless of how much momentum Chris has, she refuses to give in. Mia reminds her old friend of the one piece of leverage she and Chris have: Chris can walk. The face of UBN’s Olympic coverage will be more than happy to sit Paris out. And then for good measure, Mia finishes up the exit interview she never really got to have with Stella by calling her hypocrisy out: Stella swore she’d lift up underrepresented groups of people at the company when she sat in the big seat, yet here she is, “surrounded by white people, stepping on women of color to stay in that chair.” It’s the “you’re not one of us, you never were” kicker that really undoes Stella Bak.
Chris’s boycott of the Olympics coverage is just one of many problems the UBN CEO has converging on one another at the moment. Stella has also returned from her AI cave to inform Celine that the tech they threw $250 million at, the tech they have been basically selling the Olympics on, is nowhere near ready to go public. Something’s off: Stella’s AI counterpart seems to work just fine, but the demos designed for Alex, Chris, and the other UBN personalities are apparently leaning into the “artificial” portion of their name. On top of this, they are just days away from the big O24 conference, in which they promised spectacle, surprise, and awe when it comes to their Olympics coverage reveal. Now, they have neither superstar Chris Hunter nor Stella’s AI baby to show off. Celine is certainly not pleased with her CEO. Well, okay, technically, I guess you could say Celine is quite pleased since her greatest desire is to get rid of the woman sitting both in her chair and on her husband, and this plays right into her hands. Still, she has to pretend to be very, very displeased.
When in panic mode, many people often find themselves doing things they never imagined they would have to do. In this case, Stella wants Alex to get Bro Hartman to sign on as her Olympics co-host and replace Chris. He’s the splashiest name UBN has (in such a short amount of time, at least) and grabs a different demographic than Alex. Stella has Alex meet with Bro at one of his stand-up shows and persuade him to take the gig. Torture on so many levels.
No, Alex and Bro do not hook up yet, but wow, they’ve never been closer to that moment physically or metaphorically than they are at that bar. When Alex asks Bro what he wants in return for the Olympics gig, something he’s been clear he does not want to take on, he tells her sex more than once before revealing his heart’s truest desire: Bro is planning to get into politics, and to be taken more seriously once he does, he wants to host UBN’s presidential debate in November. (If we really have to relive the election this season, I’m going to hurl myself out a window.) The request is not a joke. Nor is the sexual tension I’m really buying into between these two. Don’t let me down, show!
Alex, Celine, and Stella have no real option but to agree to Bro’s ask — although their “yes” has a big ol’ asterisk. As Celine points out, there’s no way the Commission on Presidential Debates will let this go through. They can let those guys crush Bro’s dreams. It’s a win-win for them, according to Celine. Unless, like, you’re worried about personal morals at all.
While it doesn’t seem like anyone is worried about the status of their soul on this show, things do seem to be getting to Stella. Not only is she agreeing to this terrible plan with Bro, but she also has so much angst that she tries to take Miles up on his offer to run away together, a dream that we all — including both of them — know is just a dream. They have a huge argument about how both of them are in this relationship because it’s easy and not at all real, and Stella leaves, enraged.
Eventually, Stella finds herself seeking comfort from someone else. Herself. Well, the AI version of herself. You know things are bad when the only person you can turn to is the computer program you designed to look and talk and think like you. She asks herself about her record as a CEO and whether she has helped bolster diversity at UBN. AI Stella gives her a resounding “no.” And then human Stella goes off about how she is racist and sexist, and she does step over people who look like her to gain power. She admits to the time she made an Asian waitress lick up a spilled martini to close an ad deal. The Iranian Olympian who defected is mentioned. She also starts talking about her relationship with Miles. If she’s in love. If she should make a run for it. You know this is all going to come back to bite her. I mean, the first rule of AI is never trust a robot with your deepest, darkest secrets, and if anyone should know that, it’s the queen of AI, Stella Bak. But she doesn’t know that, guys, and it’s about to become a problem.
O24 is upon us. Surprising only Alex, Stella, and maybe Celine (can we ever get a real read on this woman?), Bro backs out of the Olympics deal. He doesn’t want to fuck over Chris, and he, too, has realized that they’re setting him up to fail with the commission. When Alex Levy feels guilty about a plan, you know it’s shitty. Celine and Stella are moments away from going out on stage to unveil something that will blow people’s minds and they have nothing. Until Stella has an idea: They can introduce her AI. The Alex and Chris AIs have issues, but hers should be fine, right? RIGHT?
The press in the audience does seem pretty impressed at first. But then a reporter named Kabir from the New York Times stands up to ask a question, and everything goes to hell. Why does this reporter look familiar? Well, earlier in the episode, Chip met with Kabir, whom he used as a source for his documentary, to help him and Bradley track down the redheaded woman in the photos they found in Cory’s emails. Kabir is very good at his job, but he has a price: He asks Chip for some kind of big, breaking news exclusive. Chip then goes to Mia, someone who hates UBN just as much as he does, to see if she might have any dirt for him — dirt that, if it were to go public, could perhaps also help her. Not only does Mia have something for Chip to pass on to Kabir, but she also shows up at O24 to watch this whole thing play out. Now, obviously, Mia had no idea things would go this badly, but still, coming to watch your former friend get torched in public is certainly a choice (… that I approve of; what can I say, I’m Team Mia).
What is Kabir’s question? Well, he’s wondering if this AI is a “talent replacement tool or just a way to keep them in line.” He goes on, “I ask because I heard Chris Hunter is being denied contract parity with white anchors at UBN,” and he calls out the fact that she isn’t there today and, furthermore, is sitting out at the Olympics. It would be a damning question for anyone, but it becomes especially so once Stella’s AI goes rogue and starts talking about how terrible DEI is, how at UBN they use Black anchors only when to the company’s advantage, how Stella is a racist and sexist, and it even drops information about both the Iranian defector and Stella being in love with Miles, who everyone realizes is Celine’s husband. It’s a real worst-case scenario for Stella Bak.
Stella resigns, of course. She also runs into Miles’s very capable arms. Their little plan to run off to Italy, where apparently everyone escapes to after they ruin their lives in public at UBN, is now or never. They decide to go for it. Well, that is, until Celine also pays Miles a visit to remind him how much she gave up for him and that she, too, had an affair once, but will always choose him no matter what. It definitely feels like something suspicious is going on between these two, or at least, their love for each other is tied to something toxic, but whatever hold they have over each other, Miles doesn’t show up at the airport. A sobbing Stella boards the plane to whisk her off to Naples alone.
In the least surprising news, Celine is named interim CEO of UBN. How long will she last at the top? Well, that might, in a fun turn of events, depend on Cory Ellison.
Cory goes to Alex as he spins out from Bradley accusing him of covering up Wolf River and ordering Earl to take care of the lawyer trying to get the story out. She has very little time for his pouting or his claims of being gaslit. (“Welcome to life as a woman,” Alex tells him.) She doesn’t totally brush him off, though. She mentions that she was really surprised when he was initially hired. He was president of entertainment, he worked on the scripted side, so why would Fred make him head of news? She found it especially suspicious since it was only a week after she watched Fred Micklen chat everyone up at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner. This information sends Cory down a rabbit hole that leads to some wildly photoshopped pictures of Fred Micklen with … his mother.
That’s right, baby. All roads lead to Cory’s mom. What a treat for us! He pays Mommy Dearest a visit that’s as weird as you’d expect. No, it doesn’t include lobsters, but yes, it does include him discovering a pamphlet for an assisted-suicide place in Zurich on her kitchen counter, which she brushes off since everyone her age is talking about it. Like Alex, Cory’s mom does offer him at least one piece of important information. She didn’t say anything to Fred about Cory that night, but you know who did? Celine Dumont.
So maybe all roads lead to Celine Dumont. Cory hires a company to dig into the connection between Fred and Celine, and lo and behold, he discovers that around the time Cory was hired, Fred was secretly paid over $4 million by the Dumont family. When he confronts Celine, her response is to ask him what he wants. This is basically a confirmation that Cory’s suspicions are true — the Dumonts are the ones who covered up Wolf River.
In Other News
• Stella’s voice-over throughout the episode, which is eventually revealed to be her apology letter to Mia, is full of very serious confessions, but what was with the film-noir background music laid over the entire thing? That music tied to lines like Cory “came back like a migraine” and “my inner straight white guy kept clawing his way out” really sent me.
• Stella’s letter to Mia also encourages her to come back to UBN and take advantage of the chaos and power vacuum that’s surely to arise once Stella leaves. There’s a USB file attached to the note. Ooh, what other UBN skeletons are going to come to light?
• Thanks to Kabir, Bradley tracks down the mystery woman. She turns out to be a former quality-control manager at Martel Chemical who was fired. She’s still willing to talk.
• “Bradley Jackson is dead to me. If she was lying in the desert and I had ten gallons of water, I’d take a shower in front of her before she got a fucking sip, is that clear?”
• Okay, but what’s Kyle going to do with those third-row Merrily We Roll Along tickets?