The Studio: Seth Rogen’s Smart Satire of The Movie Biz, On TV

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A-

There are great movies about the ongoing lovers’ quarrel between the art and commerce of making movies. See Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in The Rain, Frederico Fellini’s 8 ½, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Francis Truffault’s Day for Night, Robert Altman’s The Player.

Now, for our current fraught times we have The Studio, written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, a farcical satire about contemporary moviemaking which, appropriately for the times, isn’t a movie at all.

Instead, it’s a pricey, star-studded 10-part TV series, with guest appearances from real-world directors Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Olivia Wilde and Sarah Polley, along with actors Zoë Kravitz, Anthony Mackie and Dave Franco, and a core cast includes the likes of Bryan Cranston and Catherine O’Hara.

The elevator pitch? Think of a Curb Your Enthusiasm-style comedy starring Rogen as a new head of a contemporary fictional studio, trying to create something, if not high art, at least creatively alive in the current fractured media landscape.

According to Rogen, back in his twenties, he and his writing-directing partner Goldberg presented an idea for a script to a Hollywood executive. The man told them, “I used to love movies but now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them.” The co-writers put that executive’s words in the mouth of Rogen’s character, Matt Remick, a people-pleasing, anxiety-ridden newly crowned studio head of the fictional Continental Studios.

As the series begins, Matt takes over from his boss and mentor, the sharp-tongued Patty Leigh (O'Hara) who has just been axed by the CEO Griffin Mill (Cranston), partly because her standards were too high for the current market.

For his debut project, Mill wants Matt to make a movie about the Kool-Aid mascot, the anthropomorphized pitcher known as Kool-Aid Man. In a typical burst of bombastic profanity, Mill pronounces, “If Warner Brothers can make a billion fucking dollars off the plastic tits of a pussyless doll, we should be able to make two billion dollars off the legacy brand of Kool-Aid.”

First, Matt assembles his team, promoting his ambitious assistant Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders) to junior executive status and his bullishly low-brow VP of production Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz). They’re guided in their decisions by the raunchy marketing chief Maya Mason (Kathryn Hahn).

With the Barbie example in mind, Matt declares his intention to make an “auteur driven, Oscar-winning Kool-Aid movie.” Enter Martin Scorsese with a possible script, a deeply serious take on Kool-Aid’s legacy and the Jonestown cult massacre (though the poisoned drink at the Jonestown cult massacre was, in fact, a knock-off called Flavor-Aid). Not surprisingly, this is something the studio chief is not willing to swallow.

Neither deeply biting nor introspective, The Studio is largely screwball fun, a mixture of fast-talking salty language, cringe moments, insider jokes, and a refreshing degree of creative playfulness. A couple of episodes play creatively with movie styles.

One episode sees Matt, viewing himself as a creative producer, creating chaos on the set in his anxiety to witness a “oner,” a single long shot that’s the culmination of a Sarah Polley period picture starring Grace Lee. Amid lots of in-jokes about single take films such as Christopher Nolan’s 1917, the entire manic episode itself appears to be done in a single winding shot.

The Olivia Wilde episode about recovering a lost reel of film — a relic of the pre-digital age — is a film noir pastiche.

One constant is Matt’s pride and spinelessness, including his fear of delivering a critical note to director Ron Howard, which awakens Opie’s unexpected vengeful dark side. The entire studio goes into panic mode with the possibility that casting the rapper-actor Ice-Cube as the obviously non-white Kool-Aid Man might be treated on social media as a “hate crime.”

Several episodes focus on status wars over pet projects, parking spots or Golden Globe mentions. The grittiest episode involves Matt dating a paediatric oncologist (Rebecca Hall) who takes him to a gala dinner of fellow doctors, who aren’t shy about showing their lack of respect for the make-believe world of Hollywood.

The final couple of episodes of the first season (one assumes there will be more) involve Continental’s presentation of its upcoming slate at CinemaCon, the Las Vegas theatre owners’ convention where, since 2011, studios push the latest action and horror franchises and exhibitors strategize on how to put backsides in seats. These broadly slapstick last couple of episodes, while funny, are a bit depressing, a reminder of that lost communal feeling that Hollywood is trying to sell.

As The Studio series confirms, it’s far more civilized to turn on the big-screen TV at a convenient time, adjust the sound to a level you like and watch a clever show about human beings without a sea of people muttering, spilling food, and reading their phones all around you.

The Studio. Created by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Alex Gregory, Peter Heck and Frida Perez. Starring Seth Rogen, Catherine O’Hara, Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders, and Kathryn Hahn. The first two episodes dropped March 26 AppleTV+ with one new episode premiering each week for the next eight weeks.