Appreciating Greta Lee’s subtlety in ‘The Morning Show’
I roll my eyes some when I watch “The Morning Show,” because it can be cringey. Whenever the writers rip from the headlines, most recently with the Jan. 6 insurrection and the war in Ukraine, or when they try to turn Jennifer Aniston’s badly behaved anchor into some kind of heroine, or when the time-jumping gets particularly frenetic, I get hate-watchy. I don’t look away, of course; it’s a hot mess, and compelling as such.
One actor in the middle of all this has my sincere appreciation, though. While many of the performers around her are servicing fans and playing off and into their celebrity images, Greta Lee more than holds her own among the Alist cast. Her presence reminds me of the early days of Asia Kate Dillon’s Taylor on “Billions,” as an outsider who brings out different facets of the other characters. She plays Stella Bak, one of the few people at UBA who has some sense of ethics, journalistic and otherwise.
Sure, on occasion, she’ll do bad things. Remember when she watched a waitress lick up a spilled drink for a pair of advertising bros at the upfronts? But at least she suffers emotional repercussions, crying in the car afterward, aware that it was degrading on many levels. She knows it had to be done to save the network from Jon Hamm’s Paul Marks.
Lee’s Stella can certainly play hardball, and she keeps a cool head; but she is not hard-hearted. She puts up with insults and mistreatment from Alex and Billy Crudup’s Cory, but underneath we know she’s unhappy about it. She desperately doesn’t want Marks to take over, but she is working against him in her own way, behind the scenes. Amid the show’s generally bombastic tone, she maintains an appealing sense of subtlety.