The Morning Show‘s Nestor Carbonell on costly slip-ups and the threat of cancellation
Carbonell, who plays Yanko on Apple TV's The Morning Show, on cancel culture in modern media
TV Features The Morning Show
In this week’s episode of the Apple TV Plus drama The Morning Show, Nestor Carbonell’s Yanko Flores is a weatherman under siege. No, he’s not stuck in a snowdrift or facing an oncoming tornado. Instead he’s caught in a hurricane of online sentiment created after he flippantly uses a Native American term to describe his adoring relationship with Punxsatawney Phil.
Yanko apologizes, and he thinks that’s enough, but the internet soldiers on and Yanko faces real consequences for using a phrase he never knew was offensive. It’s a touch heavy handed, to be sure, but that’s The Morning Show for you.
We talked to Nestor Carbonell about Yanko’s gaffe, and you can watch that whole chat in the video above. Carbonell told us that, personally, he had no knowledge “whatsoever” that the term Yanko uses could be offensive, saying he thinks The Morning Show’s writers are “trying to come up with something as innocent as possible to drive the point home.”
That point, Carbonell says, is that “cancel culture has run amok,” saying “You can insult one person and it can mean that they would start a campaign to not just criticize you, but to destroy you.”
While Carbonell acknowledges that there’s “absolutely a validity in criticizing someone for something they might say that might be offensive,” he thinks “this notion of dragging [someone] through the mud, through a campaign of destruction is another thing altogether.”
If you want to read more about why the term Yanko used is offensive to indigenous people, you can check out this excellent piece by Discover Magazine. If you’d like to hear more from the cast of The Morning Show, you can check out our recent interviews with Jennifer Aniston, Billy Crudup, Mark Duplass, and Karen Pittman, as well as the show’s creator, Mimi Leder.
20 Comments
If I never see the phrase “cancel culture” again it will be too soon
How does he feel about bats?
He was born in the 1800s so adapting to all this must be harder for him than most people.
Cierra tus ojos
He’s correct that the problem with Cancel Culture is that the sense of scale is completely out of whack.
OMG, shut the hell up already…..cancel culture doesn’t exist. Has Mel Gibson, Joe Rogan, Woody Allen or any other horrendous human being been actually cancelled ? Tucker Carlson, 5 nights a week is basically preaching intolerance and fascism and has he been cancelled ? He should be but he hasn’t because it doesn’t freaking exist
Daniel Elder got cancelled. Colin Kaepernick got cancelled. It obviously exists, it’s just more complicated than people say.
Here’s my take, which I am perfectly open to revising, as this is off the cuff.
At this point, it seems like the term “cancel culture” is used to conflate two distinct (but broad) categories:
1) situations where a person does something truly despicable (sexual assault, openly using ethnic slurs that there’s no excuse for them not to know about, etc.) and suffers consequences for it (e.g. charged with a crime, gets fired from job); and2) when someone inadvertently says something offensive (NB: just because it was inadvertent doesn’t mean it wasn’t offensive), and the “consequence” is that randos yell at them on Twitter for a couple of days and then everyone forgets about it when they move on to the next thing.Obviously these are not the only two situations but they seem to cover the bulk of it. There’s a lot of variations because the people who end up in type 2 situations can vary from non-famous rando who gets signal boosted for some reason, to non-celebrities who are in positions of power (e.g. a school board member or other minor politician), to minor or even major celebrities.
Anyway, plenty of people have had suffered significant negative consequences (and deservedly so) by the first type; virtually no one has suffered significant negative consequences of the second type, and when they do, it’s usually because they continue to double down on “the thing I said isn’t actually offensive!” to the point where they draw so much negative attention that people no longer want to work with them.Carbonell et. al. either believe (incorrectly) or want everyone to believe (disingenuously) that the second type frequently or even usually leads to life-ruining consequences, and that the first type leads to life-ruining consequences whether there’s any proof or not. As if a single accusation of you doing something wrong (when there’s no evidence) will cause everyone to burn you alive.
Yeah, cancel culture is kind of weird. Where it’s like one person has raped 10 people and another one made a rape joke on Twitter, 10 years ago. How is someone supposed to have a coherent opinion on that?
I think this is pretty solid, but in between 1 and 2 is people saying shit they know is offensive, or at least that they know ahead of time other people may think is offensive, and then responding angrily to any backlash against it (and usually said backlash is closer to category 2, i.e. Dave Chappelle says some bullshit about Trans people, gets called out for it loudly, but then continues to have a platform and get paid while he doubles down on it because he’s mad people are mad and when people say Netflix shouldn’t be streaming his special everyone cries “cancel culture” to defend the poor rich celebrity).
Very true. I think a proper elaboration on the subject would have to start by delineating various categories of behavior, various responses to allegations of such behavior, actual consequences people suffer, and so on. One major problem with the actual rhetoric around all this is that the term “cancel culture” is so poorly-defined (nobody seems to use it to mean the same thing) that anyone making assertions about it (“CC has gone too far” or “CC doesn’t exist”) are essentially meaningless. Person A says “CC (meaning X) has gone too far” and person B responds by saying “CC (meaning Y) doesn’t exist,” which is obviously a stupid state of affairs.
Cancel Culture is about how people respond and not if they are successful. There is a tendency to attempt to shut down someone who speaks or does things that don’t 100% line up with a personal agenda. It was a strategy wielded by the far right long before the term ‘cancel culture’ came into play. It’s the Southern Baptist Convention telling its churches not to take trips to Disneyland/World because Disney let’s gay people walk in the daily parades. It’s the Satanic Panic of burn the evil Dungeons & Dragons books or Ozzy Osborne records. The internet has just let a very, very vocal minority sound like they’re more than they are because they can post incessantly and anonymously all day on the internet. Just because a shit stain like Tucker Carlson still has a show, that doesn’t negate the fact that cancel culture exists. It just shows that it’s not as effective as people think.
I used to say that Facebook and Fox News did exactly to “them” what they said games and heavy metal were doing to “us.”But nah. The Trump era has removed any benefit of the doubt. They’ve always been this way.
I love this post. Made visiting the site so much more awesome! Thanks for the hilarious caricature of a crazy avclub Twitter bro. Maybe too on the nose, but still hilarious.
I’m sorry, but I cannot ever see Nestor Carbonell and not hear this line from the (first) live action Tick series premiere.
“No, I’m telling you Falco died. Si, “Amadeus, Amadeus.” He is a dead person.”
~Batmanuel
For me it’s:“What size are you?”“I’m Batmanuel size”
“Spirit animal”Jesus Christ, you whiny fucks.
There’s nuance to be found in the conversation about online outrage, but this is just head-up-its-ass stupid. A weatherman saying “spirit animal” might result in corporate prompting him to make a short apology, not a campaign against him.
He’ll always be Batmanuel to me
Is the AVclub at some point gonna interview every single actor on Ted Lasso and The Morning Show (i suggest interviewing the kid who plays Alex Levy’s daughter on The Morning Show)