Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Studio’ On Apple TV+, Where Seth Rogen Is A Studio Chief Trying To Make Good Movies In An Era Of Franchises

Whenever a series tries to make a satire about how crazy show business is, it often gets weighed down in finding humor from inside-baseball showbiz references. They’re ones that people like us, who are in entertainment journalism, would laugh at, but most people would scratch their heads at. There are probably a few shows and movies from the 2010s, for instance, that made references to Nikki Finke, a reference that makes little sense now. Apple TV+’s new comedy The Studio, from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, has its share of insidery dialogue. But at it’s heart, it’s about a guy who loves movies getting his dream job and finding out that it’s a complete nightmare.

THE STUDIO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We pull in to a snowy cabin, and a man runs out; shots ring out from the inside.

The Gist: The man getting shot at is actually a character in a movie played by Paul Dano, and he and the director, Peter Berg, confer on how to improve the scene. In the meantime, Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), an executive for Continental Pictures, appears on the set; he’s gladhanded by Dano and Berg but is generally ignored.

Matt gets into a golf cart driven by his assistant, Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders) to go to to his office. Along with everyone else, he’s hearing rumors that the new owner of the studio, Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) has fired the longtime studio head, Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara). When he is summoned by to an empty workroom, Mill asks Matt why he wants Patty’s job.

Matt is a film lover and always wanted to be in charge of a studio to pick and shape projects. Mill, though, needs someone who is very aware of the bottom line, and who will make films that will make the studio “as much money as possible.” To that end, he tells Matt that he’s secured the rights to the Kool-Aid brand. “If Warner Bros. can make a billion dollars off the plastic tits of a pussy-less doll,” Mill says, referring to Barbie, “we should be able to make two billion dollars off the legacy brand of Kool-Aid.” Against his better judgement and desperate to land the job, Matt feigns enthusiasm.

He still wants to make a quality film, though, and when he and fellow executive Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz) consult with Mitch Weitz (David Krumholtz), agent to a number of well-known directors, the name that comes up is Nicholas Stoller. Matt tries to avoid taking a meeting with the director of The Muppets, but under time pressure from Mill, takes Stoller’s pitch.

It’s still not satisfying, so, during a meeting with Martin Scorsese, Matt somehow manages the legendary director to rename his film about Jonestown to Kool-Aid and come aboard; Matt even pays $10 million for the script. Thinking he landed a huge score, he’s excoriated by Maya (Kathryn Hahn), the marketing executive. She can’t sell a film about Jonestown, much less one that stars Marty’s suggested lead, Steve Buscemi.

As Matt starts to realize the reality of the situation, he swipes Stoller’s pitch in a meeting with Mill, then has to make Patty, who has a connection with Stoller, a producer in order to get Stoller back on board. Now Matt has to tell Scorsese, his favorite director, that not only is the Jonestown film dead, but he needs to kill the script that he bought from Marty.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The plot of The Studio isn’t all that far off from the recent HBO series The Franchise.

Our Take: Rogen and Evan Goldberg directed all of the episodes of The Studio, which they created with Alex Gregory, Peter Huyck and Frida Perez. The style they’re trying to achieve is the continual, one-take shooting style we saw recently in Adolescence, but we do see places where there might have been edits, and it’s not like Rogen and Goldberg are trying to make the entire episode in one take. But the feeling they’re trying to evoke is manic, to show just how insane things can be at a legacy Hollywood studio in this day and age.

As with most shows and films about the business of show, things can get insidery, but at its heart, the story of The Studio is about a guy getting his dream job and finding out that the job is a complete nightmare.

When Matt goes to Patty’s house — after she screams at him for stabbing her in the back then negotiates a multi-picture deal — he tells his mentor that he’d rather go back to being “angry and resentful” that he didn’t have the job than having the job and feeling the stress associated with it. It’s certainly a telling moment, one that makes the story more personal than just another series that thinks that pointing out all the craziness inherent in the movie business is funnier than it actually is.

What’s interesting is that Rogen, while having funny lines throughout the first episode, is really the show’s straight man. Cranston, Hahn, O’Hara and Barinholtz get all the opportunities to be their hilarious selves and we generally see Rogen’s Matt reacting to all the nuttiness. For instance, the reaction Hahn’s character Mays has when Matt tells her that Kool-Aid is going to be about Jonestown is classic Hahn, and it gave us the biggest laugh in the episode. Heck, even Scorsese and the myriad of other show business notables playing themselves get off better lines than Rogen.

It makes us wonder if that’s what Rogen and Goldberg had in mind for Matt, or that it’s just a matter that being a beleaguered cineaste resigned to making franchise dreck is just inherently less funny. Either way, the fact that Rogen, Goldberg and company manage to give everyone else a chance to be over-the-top funny makes for a good balance, with Matt’s desire to make good films grounding everyone else’s motivations of greed and ambition.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Matt and Sal, longtime buddies, sit down at Matt’s place to watch Goodfellas after the debacle with Scorsese. They also toast to the late Ray Liotta, who was rumored to be well-endowed.

Sleeper Star: We always like seeing David Krumholtz on our screens, and we especially loved how, when his character Mitch sits down with Matt and Sal, Mitch jokes, “And they say there are no more Jews working in Hollywood! We’re almost to a minyan!”

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Studio differentiates itself from other movie business comedies by balancing the inside-baseball material with Matt Remick’s desire to just make good movies and finding out that’s not really possible. It helps that the excellent cast, and the huge roster of guest stars, are given hilarious things to do as Matt swims upstream as a studio head.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.