If you’re like me, you don’t intentionally accumulate streaming subscriptions — you sign up to watch just one thing and then conveniently forget to cancel when you’re done. I reactivated Apple TV+ for the long-delayed second season of the brilliant “Severance,” a must for fans of dystopian science fiction and absurdist workplace satire. But when my show was over, I stuck around to sample “The Studio,” from the comedy team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Superbad, Pineapple Express). The seventh episode (of 10) of this stylish sitcom about Hollywood debuts on Wednesday, April 30.
The deal
The guard is changing at Continental Studios, a venerable film factory housed in a grandiose Mayan Revival building. When longtime studio head Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara) is fired, ambitious younger executive Matt Remick (Rogen) is tapped to replace her. First, however, CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) makes Matt promise to green-light a big-budget, four-quadrant (i.e., all-ages) movie based on the Kool-Aid IP. Barbie for Kool-Aid, as it were.
This plan wouldn’t trouble Matt’s buddy and rival Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), who cheerfully parrots the CEO’s refrain that Continental makes “movies, not films.” But Matt fancies himself a cinephile. Dreaming of winning Oscars and running the most “talent-friendly” studio in Hollywood, he finds nothing more exciting than hanging out on set.
But Matt’s attempts to foster artistic expression have a way of going hilariously awry. For instance, when Martin Scorsese (playing himself) pitches a gritty drama about the Jonestown tragedy, the new studio head hatches what he believes is a brilliant scheme to transform the mandated Kool-Aid movie into awards bait. You can guess how that goes.
Will you like it?
If you’re a fan of Hollywood satire, you recognize CEO “Griffin Mill” as a nod to the protagonist of Robert Altman’s 1992 The Player. Director-cocreators Rogen and Goldberg are hyperaware of the tradition they’re working in, which dates back at least as far as 1950’s Sunset Boulevard. Like Altman, they stud their stories with casual celebrity cameos — Anthony Mackie, Ron Howard, Charlize Theron — and winking metafictional elements.
For instance, the brilliantly choreographed episode “The Oner,” in which Matt can’t stop disrupting a director’s attempt to capture a time-sensitive shot in one take, is itself a “oner.” The heavier-handed “The Missing Reel,” in which a director insists on shooting her neo-noir drama on film, is styled like a noir.
But there’s a big difference between Altman’s satire and “The Studio.” Where Tim Robbins’ “player” character was suave and amoral, Matt is earnest, buffoonish and prone to pratfalls. He’s a fanboy who thinks he’s living out the dream of being able to fund his heroes’ artistic efforts, only to learn his job is actually to crush them.
If you stop after the first episode — as I nearly did — you may dismiss the comedy of “The Studio” as overly broad. Has any studio head in the history of Hollywood been dense enough to think the makers of Kool-Aid would want their product’s name on a Jonestown movie? The episode forces us into the position of cheering on the odious head of marketing (Kathryn Hahn, complete with trendy threads and TikTok vocabulary) as she tries to dissuade Matt from his awful plan.
Maybe Matt’s floundering is the point, though, because studios themselves now seem a little absurd, like vestiges of another time. In the context of a post-pandemic streaming show, Matt’s effort to make a Kool-Aid franchise artistically relevant takes on the tragicomic dimensions of Don Quixote tilting at windmills in a doomed quest to restore chivalry. The underlying joke of “The Studio” is that the guy most eager to save the movies is sabotaging them at every turn.
O’Hara shines as Patty, a gravel-voiced harpy with a heart who serves as Matt’s mentor, urging him to accept that his dream factory is a “meat grinder.” But Matt struggles to reconcile himself to sausage making. In “The Oner,” his insistence on contributing to the artistic process causes havoc. In “The Note,” his reluctance to deliver negative feedback to a celebrity results in a comically escalating battle of egos.
Some episodes of “The Studio” are stronger than others. So far, most of the characters could use more development. But the hectic style — every scene is shot in one take with a single camera — fits the harried hero. And when the show’s satire is on, it’s on.
In the sixth episode, Matt’s date with a doctor brings him face-to-face with the reality that people outside the biz now find his job not glamorous but irrelevant. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, whether for a studio head or a cinephile. “The Studio” has a potent message for fans of the traditional cinema experience: In a time of growing scarcity, art and commerce need each other to survive.
If you like this, try…
“The Larry Sanders Show” (90 episodes, 1992-1998; Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): In interviews, Rogen and Goldberg name as their main inspiration this behind-the-scenes sitcom about a fictional late-night talk show.
“The Comeback” (21 episodes, 2005-2014; Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Another influence on “The Studio” was this wickedly funny mockumentary series in which Lisa Kudrow plays a washed-up TV star trying to revive her career with a reality show.
The Player (1992; Kanopy, Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Robert Altman kicked off the modern tradition of pitch-dark Hollywood satire with this film in which a studio exec’s clash with a screenwriter escalates to murder.