‘The Studio’: A Hilarious Study in Hollywood Panic

Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), the newly installed president of  Continental Studios, has two fatal flaws: he wants desperately for the movie directors and actors who work for him (crew members, maybe not so much) to like him. And he genuinely loves cinema, convincing himself that he can make the next Rosemary’s Baby in the era of billion-dollar retail IP franchises and streaming consolidation.

You can see the problem already, right? Remick can only keep his new job by appealing to the commercial desires of the movie market. That means pissing off the artists he admires by making excruciating decisions that are devastating enough to make Martin Scorsese double over and cry.

That’s the concept of The Studio, a new Apple TV+ series co-created by Rogen and his longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg, Larry Sanders and Veep veteran writers Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory, and newcomer Frida Perez. Rogen and Goldberg direct all the episodes. The show’s first two episodes debuted at South by Southwest where some the show’s stacked cast (Catherine O’ Hara, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders) appeared.

The Studio represents another creative jump forward for Rogen and Goldberg, who’ve come a long way from Superbad and Sausage Party. They’ve built each episode to be relatively self-contained and mostly composed of extended single takes, which Rogen admitted at the screening was a challenge to shoot, even with a dream team of comedic talent. When O’Hara revealed that some scenes took 40 takes to shoot, a chuckling Rogen kept insisting the average was 16.

The labor paid off. The show apes the cinematic look of the world it portrays, but the extended-shot technique also amps up the relatively low stakes (outside of Hollywood, at least), turning each episode into a potential real-time panic attack of mistakes, bad choices, and burnt stacks of studio money. Wisely, The Studio doesn’t try to top Robert Altman’s seminal Hollywood noir, The Player, by trying to raise the stakes even higher with something like a murder plot.

Instead, in Rogen, Goldberg, and Huyck’s capable hands, The Studio relies on great structuring and big comedic payoffs, like a stressful blend of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry Sanders, and The Bear. But unlike HBO’s similarly themed The Franchise, which Max canceled after one season and which got sillier and less plausible as it went, The Studio benefits from the verisimilitude of having huge stars including Charlize Theron, Paul Dano, and Greta Lee, plus directors such as Scorsese, Sarah Polley, and Nicholas Stoller playing themselves.

The world Remick navigates seems close enough to Hollywood to pass the sniff test, even if the first few episodes make little mention of how the streaming content wars would threaten the very existence of a studio like Continental. In today’s IP-driven environment, it’s not hard to believe that one of Remick’s first tasks as studio chief is to figure out how to make a franchise film out of the Kool-Aid brand.

The cast is superb, particularly O’Hara in every scene she’s in, and Hahn as a marketing executive desperately trying to turn Remmick’s pretensions of artistry into four-quadrant moneymakers for Continental. It’s also nice to see Bryan Cranston doing goofy comedy again as Remick’s CEO boss, a gone-to-seed Robert Evans type who cares less about film quality than commercial viability. Barinholtz, Dewayne Perkins, and sitcom ringer Keyla Monterroso Mejia (also of Curb and Abbott Elementary) round out Remick’s Continental staff.

I’ve only seen the first two episodes, so it’s hard to say if the full 10-episode season, which starts on March 26, will sustain the madcap energy and cringy set pieces of those early ones. But at SXSW, Rogen promised that the show’s constant sense of panic settles down in its latter half with episodes themed around the Golden Globes and a finale that takes place at a Comic-Con-like entertainment convention.

Even with his insecurity and propensity toward making wrong decisions, Remick remains a likeable main character. He’s a well-intentioned meddler who knows that the tiniest decisions last forever on the big screen. The Studio is carefully crafted enough– and more importantly it’s funny enough–to fill the small screen and then some.