Greta Lee Leaves ‘The Morning Show’: Stella’s AI Disaster

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “If Then,” the sixth episode of Season 4 of “The Morning Show,” now streaming on Apple TV.

Ladies and gentlemen, Stella Bak 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 division leader at UBN, played by Greta Lee, saw the carefully crafted and fast-paced life she’d built for herself come crashing down on top of her – in front of 200 journalists, her boss Celine (Marion Cotillard) and the rest of the world.

“For me, this was the moment before an explosion,” says Lee Variety. “It’s all the centrifugal force that’s built up after years of having to operate in a certain way. She’s gotten quite smart since the day she first arrived, but I think it’s clear – or it was clear to me – that it’s not sustainable.”

It’s been one stumbling block after another this season for the woman first introduced to audiences in Season 2 as an intimidating problem solver who’d sold her tech company and carved out a niche for herself at a leading news network where women didn’t often end up in the C-Suite. But this season, Stella risked everything on her supposedly groundbreaking AI program (mind you, this will take place in spring 2024) that can translate UBN’s popular presenters into any language ahead of the network’s global coverage of the Paris Olympics. But in the sixth episode, Stella’s crisis of consciousness over her decision not to promote her friend Mia (Karen Pittman) due to the pressure to elevate her male counterpart; Mia’s defiant return in which she declares Stella an enemy of the progress she has long championed; and her ongoing affair with Miles (Aaron Pierre), Celine’s husband, leave Stella adrift.

In her voiceover during the episode, she complains that she gave in to the toxic attraction 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.” While Miles isn’t the only one putting pressure on the detonator, it doesn’t help the situation when she and Celine take the stage to present their ambitious Olympics coverage plan to the media. Hoping to distract the headline-hungry press from the network’s various other scandals, Stella rolls out a demonstration of her AI program, using her own manufactured image, despite telling Celine it is not ready yet. Unfortunately, her worst fear comes true when it not only malfunctions on stage, but also regurgitates all the hurtful, racist, and scathing things Stella had spoken into it the night before (aka herself) in a digital age version of looking in the mirror and asking if you like what you see.

The PR nightmare leaves Stella no choice but to resign. She initially retreats into Miles’ arms, and they decide to flee to Naples together. But when she arrives at the airport with a hopeful smile and more time than usual, he simply texts her, “I’m sorry.” She gets 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,” says Lee, confirming her departure, at least from season 4. “But because the show is so prescient and provides a direct commentary on what’s happening, I would of course like to see what kind of world would exist where she comes back, and what she might have to say.”

However, Stella’s downfall wasn’t a season 4 spiral. Lee belongs to the camp where her downfall (at least professionally) started last season when she endured an excruciating lunch with some slimy corporate investors. To get their support and money, they forced her to order a waitress (also a woman of color) to lick a spilled drink off the table to prove she was one of the boys. Lee says Stella never recovered from having so irreversibly compromised her ideals at that moment.

“But I hope she gets the chance now,” she adds. “I think that’s part of the problem for her. It’s like she hasn’t been given a chance to reflect or forgive or even, in a lot of ways, acknowledge in a bigger way some of the things she’s endured and done to get to where she is today. So I hope she’s doing that on a beach somewhere.”

The implosion of Stella’s image, literally thanks to her own AI, is twofold. It revealed her own deep concerns about the ways in which she has contributed to the company’s limited advancement for people and women of color at the network (Mia previously scolds her for this, saying, “You’re not one of us—you never were.”). But her AI also opens up about her affair with Miles –– in front of Celine. The French CEO uses it to immediately eliminate Stella from a business perspective.

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

“Initially I had to read the opposite myself,” she says of the filming process. “The reality of what we do is that we’re showing technology that is developing right now. You see all the pitfalls of it, and how dangerous it can be if these guardrails aren’t put in place. So when I did it, it was a mess. I did a combination of reading with someone who had a script, and then also an image of myself that didn’t quite seem like the finished product. Then going back and seeing what they generated and being completely confused by it hitting – because I was trying to determine the timing, comedic or dramatic, with a non-conscious representation of yourself is very strange.

But she couldn’t just play herself. Lee and the creative team tried to find ways to make the AI ​​present technologically perfect, but also ensure that the imperfections of AI were still fully visible.

“We talked at length about how much blinking we were going to do and blinking in the wrong place and how funny that is, because there are limits to the avatars,” she says. “That’s what’s so creepy about them and why they’ll probably never be good people. There are certain qualities that are impossible to capture. So yeah, we got to play with that a lot, and we had a lot of laughs.”

When she is betrayed by her own likeness, Stella can only look out at a shocked audience, and happen to find a familiar – if not friendly – ​​face among them. Mia watches from the nosebleed seats and Stella has to process that moment through her too. The two have been anxious advocates for each other for the past two seasons, and this season Stella promised to work for Mia’s bid for news director. But when she returned to further her own ambition with AI and the network, Mia became the embodiment of Stella’s shortcomings, a failure that haunts this scene like a ghost of what could have been.

“That moment was so charged because she knows there is a betrayal between them, the kind that you can’t come back from,” Lee says. “For each of them and for so long, the possibility of failure was something that just never existed. Like, it just wasn’t possible. So to experience the pinnacle of failure in such a public way and to have Mia witness it is almost too much to bear. That conversation, that wordless conversation across that room, is like a hundred words being said between the two of them.”

Throughout the episode, Mia, Miles, and Celine all told Stella in one way or another why her decisions were doomed to failure. Especially with Miles, he admonishes her for choosing a man she could never truly have, despite their passionate pleas to choose each other over his comfortable life and her career. However, his rejection of her at the airport in the execution of said plan may be the deepest cut in Stella’s not a good, very bad day. She is left broken, unsure whether to board the plane or try to repair the wreckage in her wake.

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

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

Don’t cry too much for Stella. Let’s not forget that she sold her tech company for hundreds of millions, and she had plenty of zeros in her paycheck before she left the stage at UBN. So her next chapter will be very well funded, even if her personal and professional life is in shambles. But Stella has proven herself to be extremely resilient. The big question now is whether she will return to the show, as so many (perhaps too many?) former UBN executives have done. Lee says she enjoys working with “The Morning Show” ensemble and is always happy to spar with them about media jargon. But conversely, she is also very protective of Stella and her journey, and she 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,” Lee says. “I think the world needs to change a little more to make room for her in the way I would like to see her. Otherwise, we will just see her as a slave to this company. As a slave to unfulfilled desires, and I don’t want that for her.”

Considering that “The Morning Show” has been around for about a year and is behind our own timeline, audiences may have a long wait until our current world is worthy of Stella Bak’s resurrection. Until then, Lee hopes she spends some of those millions somewhere far away from the 24-hour news cycle.

“I want her to be completely surprised by what’s available to her,” Lee says. “If she ever comes back, I want her to be a little bit like Matthew McConaughey as the beach bum, with bongos and hair. I want her to be a little bit shaken up by life in the real world. Just to kind of feed her soul and become a person. Because I really think it comes from that place that she might have something ingenious to offer.”

But for those who watched the episode and thought for a moment that Stella had suddenly died off-screen, you weren’t alone. When Alex (Jennifer Aniston) announces Stella’s resignation on air, the reflective script on her career at UBN sounded very much like a eulogy, so much so that some people even mentioned it to Lee.

“Jen cried when she came to settle in on my last day,” says Lee. “It was so sweet, and Mimi [Leder] had such beautiful words that day. We are a family, so it was really moving. But you’re not alone if you thought this was a eulogy. Some other people in our crew said, “This is a eulogy. What’s happening?’”