Summary
Nicole Beharie delivers the best scene of The Morning Show Season 4 thus far, a show-stealing monologue saving an otherwise okay Episode 5.
I was just about ready to declare Episode 5 of The Morning Show Season 4 a bit of a dud. Stuff happens in it, sure, a lot of it clearly setup for later, but there’s no payoff to Cory telling Celine about Stella and Miles, there’s no centrepiece “event” like the plane emergency in that same episode, there’s little movement in the Wolf River case — except the anti-revelation that Cory might not have been as involved as Bradley suspected — and the focus largely moves away from Bradley and Alex. That isn’t the best formula for a great episode of this show, but it becomes one through sheer force of will, thanks almost entirely to Nicole Beharie.
“Amari” is focused primarily on Chris and Mia. The latter is looking for a new position after dramatically storming out of UBN, and the former is still fronting the network’s Olympics coverage. They seem worlds apart, but circumstances conspire to reunite them in a unique way, thanks to the sudden emergence of a salacious rumour that Chris only won two gold medals thanks to the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
The “rumour” is coming from a former track teammate of Chris’s named Tunde Johnston. It seems like petty jealousy, and Marcus and Ben are both willing to write it off as such, keeping Chris isolated until the fuss dies down. But Chris is adamant about addressing the accusations directly and taking control of her public image. She isn’t buying the idea that everyone will simply forget, and before long, she’s proven correct. The rumour develops legs, and it quickly becomes a big enough deal that it might jeopardise her position as UBN’s face of the upcoming Olympic Games.
The whole thing’s made worse when Chris gets drunk and leaves Tunde an aggressive, rambling voicemail, which she promptly leaks. Bro covers it on his show, mocking Chris and calling her “Black excellence Barbie” and other fun things. Alex tries to scold him for turning against one of their own, but she can’t argue with his counterpoint that this is newsworthy. The whole world is talking about it, and the situation needs to be contained one way or another. Enter Mia.
Mia’s planned career change at Defy Media doesn’t go to plan when Alex makes it clear that UBN is willing to do everything in their power to keep her; in other words, if they can’t have her, nobody else can either. I genuinely don’t think Alex intended this in the way Mia interpreted it, and she tries to explain as much later, but the damage is done, and Mia marches into UBN with a point to prove. She does it through Chris, whom she bumps into in the lobby, advising her to join Tunde on Bro’s show and participate in a live debate to set the record straight.
Karen Pittman in The Morning Show Season 4 | Image via Apple TV+
Tunde seems like a jealous former rival who is harboring some resentment over Chris’s athletic success — at her expense — and the fact that she seems to have lost touch with her roots and is ashamed of where she came from. Chris handles the debate fairly well, and it’s pretty even-handedly moderated by Bro. But Tunde has brought receipts, including a prescription for anabolic steroids made out in Chris’s name. It’s the smoking gun. So, Chris does the one thing nobody expected her to do. She admits it.
Nicole Beharie’s tearful monologue about feeling railroaded into taking PEDs after being dropped by her sponsors for getting pregnant is really remarkable stuff. Nobody thought a female track star could come back to her world-beating best after pregnancy and giving birth. And they were right. But in Chris’s case, she lost her son, the titular Amari, which destroyed her body and her mental health. The steroids were her only way back to where she was. Once she got there, she stopped using them. But the shame never left her, even on the Olympic podium, which is why she transitioned to broadcasting. Even Bro expresses his condolences, and Tunde sheds a tear. Chris’s reputation will be fine — better than ever, maybe. But it meant bearing her soul for the whole world to see. Don’t be surprised if Beharie wins something for this.
What else? Well, The Morning Show Season 4, Episode 5 doesn’t really offer much else, except for what’s going on with Bradley and Cory. “Amari” actually opens with them on a date, being all cosy and romantic, but Bradley is really playing the long game. At the first opportunity, she looks through Cory’s emails for any evidence of the Wolf River scandal, but her searches turn up nada. She starts to hone in on a woman who was photographed with Kenneth Stockton, but can’t identify her. When Bradley finally confesses to Alex that she and Cory slept together, Alex suggests she just ask him outright, since if he’s directly involved, she’ll have to recuse herself from the story. In classic Bradley fashion, she ends up organising another date.
But her hand is forced. While trying to find a recipe he was sent for the lasagne he was planning to cook for dinner, Cory saw the search history in his emails and realised that Bradley was manipulating him. He doesn’t buy her claims that they slept together before she learned he might have been involved, which, to be fair, are true, and he’s disgusted that she suspected him of having somehow engineered Stockton’s suicide. Cory claims not to have even known the lawyer was dead. He was told not to run the story when he was new to the network, since legal told him there was nothing in it and the company had been exonerated. He was too focused on Kessler at the time to pay much more attention. Earl was employed solely to talk Stockton out of wasting his clients’ money on baseless claims. Anything that happened after that had nothing to do with Cory.
Against my better judgment, I believe him. And so does Bradley. Which means the rabbit hole runs deeper, and in different directions than initially suspected. This may or may not be connected to the fact that when Bradley returns to her apartment, a Fed is waiting for her.
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