At first, I was a little disappointed not to see much of Jennifer Aniston or anything of Reese Witherspoon on The Morning Show this week, but this wasn’t their story. The Apple TV + series has many characters, which can sometimes be lost in the background when Alex Levy and Bradley Jackson are taking center stage. The show does have a diverse cast, but it doesn’t spend much time with the. But it did in The Morning Show season three, episode three, “White Noise.”
Warning: Spoilers
Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) was up to no good again. He leaked Cybil Richards’ (Holland Taylor) racist email. While I don’t like how it came out, since Cory had other motives, it ended up being some great storytelling and commentary on people of color getting lowballed in the media industry.
It can be hard to tackle this kind of story, especially in a show like The Morning Show, which is heightened and can get pretty crazy. The series kept its heightened level but also did a good job covering such a sensitive topic.
It was genius that the writers had Chris Hunter (Nicole Beharie) interview Cybil. It would have been a cop-out to have Alex interview her. A white person interviewing a white person about racist comments will never be done well or get anything done. Nicole Beharie did such a good job showing how emotional the character would be, but being professional during the interview and getting Cybit to bury herself live on TV. Maybe if more people at fault for underpaying their staff were called out on live TV, they would stop undervaluing them. It would be much better if they could just learn, but especially with how schools hardly touch on slavery or discrimination against African Americans, how will we ever learn?
I quite liked Mia Jordan (Karen Pittman) in this episode. It opened up with her sleeping in the studio. At first, I thought that was because of some kind of hardship, but that was just so she could run the show. It is insane that she has to live at work to do the job. There is seriously something wrong if that’s the only way to keep the show going.
She feels complicit in this whole thing as a Black woman. She can only control so much, though. But maybe she could have done more. And she did when she promoted one of her women of color to anchor producer. Regardless, this was a good look at a woman getting to the top and then failing to make changes like they probably hoped they would do. But as she’s working so hard just to keep things afloat, when does she have the time? None of this is simple.
I agree with Mia about Stella Bak (Greta Lee), though. She’s had such a high position in the company and seems to care more about power. Everyone on this show cares about power. But it was nice to take a break somewhat from all that power and hone in on important issues. Stella seems open to fixing these issues, but keeping Cybil on was not the answer. Not that Cybil didn’t do good and is the lesser of two evils of Cory, but the UBA board needs some young blood to help them change.
Luckily, Cory’s plan didn’t work. Paul Marks (Job Hamm) no longer wants to buy UBA. That may be bad financially, but after shedding light on this vital problem in the industry, Paul would have just made the company return to the status quo. And that would have been a waste of such a powerful episode.
