Desean Terry on Black Lives Matter and what’s next for The Morning Show‘s Daniel

Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the season two finale of The Morning Show. If you are worried about that sort of thing, watch the episode and come back.

Does the season two finale of The Morning Show really mark Desean Terry’s departure from the show? Is his character, Daniel, really done at UBA? Honestly, considering how little they’ve appreciated him, he probably should be.

We talked to Terry about all of those burning questions and more for the video interview above.

For instance, is Daniel really done? According to Terry, “It’ll be interesting to see exactly what Daniel does next.” The actor says he admires Daniel walking away and prioritizing family, saying that “his COVID experience made him reassess his life and maybe he has his priorities out of whack.”

Terry says that switch up is something he’s seen in his own life, and that he hopes, “whatever happens with with Daniel that we get to see that he approaches the world with a new sense of hierarchy about what’s important for him. Maybe some of the stress that he placed on himself to prove himself at UBA hopefully melts away and he finds out that he is destined for even greater things.”

Terry also had thoughts on the show’s reflection of the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, saying:

“I’ve always been a person who’s been vocal about representation mattering and what’s happening in terms of systemic racism, but during COVID, I had to go back and do even more research and more deep dives about what was going on.

I found that there were so many Daniels out there. There were so many journalists and all this amazing literature out there that was evolving our conversation about systemic oppression. How do you even have a conversation about that when you’re fighting for being recognized and being seen without just talking about your relationship to whiteness? It’s a very, very difficult and challenging thing to approach.

What I like about what Daniel is doing is that we’re seeing that he is one of those harbingers. He is one of those people who is saying, ‘you guys have to recognize what is happening here. You have to see the level to which this system is set up against me as a black person functioning within a white space.’

I think what happens three months later really opens that up, and we have not just a national conversation, but an international conversation about race.”

Season two of The Morning Show is now available in its entirety on Apple TV+. You can check out our interview with the show’s producer here, and with one of its stars, Jennifer Aniston, here.