For decades, film versus television felt like Hollywood’s forever war. Cinema was dominated by the biggest stars, the greatest directors, who sneered at the lesser medium; yet television reached vast audiences and inspired more ardent fanaticism. As the years passed, the differences became smaller – actors and filmmakers switched format with fickle abandon – and, grudgingly, the balance of power seemed to tip in favour of the small screen. The Studio, a new 10-episode series on AppleTV+, is a TV show about the travails of the film industry, and a charming, funny (though perhaps inadvertent) PR campaign for cinema’s survival.
Seth Rogen is Matt Remick, an executive at Continental Studios, an ailing Hollywood powerhouse. When his boss and mentor Patty (Catherine O’Hara) is ousted, Matt gets the big job, running the whole shebang. Matt is an old-school cinephile; a lover of grainy reels of film who’s phobic about being “lame”. But his new job challenges preoccupations. Bigwigs at the studio want Matt to focus on commercially minded filmmaking. “If Warner Bros can make a billion dollars off the plastic tits of a pussyless doll,” the studio’s chair (played, in cameo, by Bryan Cranston) tells Matt. “We should be able to make two billion dollars off the legacy brand of Kool-Aid.” And so, Matt finds himself thrown into the frenetic, cutthroat upper echelons of the industry, where art and business do daily battle.
Around Matt, Rogen (and series co-creator, and longtime collaborator, Evan Goldberg) has assembled a tight knit supporting cast. Ike Barinholtz is Sal, Matt’s loudmouth lieutenant; Kathryn Hahn is Amy, a Gen Z-obsessed cynic; and Chase Sui Wonders is Quinn, Matt’s ruthlessly ambitious former assistant. They constitute his core team at Continental, but, on an episode-by-episode basis, he’s visited by a constellation of stars: actors, like Anthony Mackie, Zac Efron and David Franco (a suspicious number of former Rogen co-stars) playing themselves, and real-life directors, like Martin Scorsese, Sarah Polley and Ron Howard (an, equally suspicious, percentage of whom have acting experience) in extended cameos. It gives the whole thing a sense of being a great Hollywood in-joke – Ha Ha Land, if you will.
First things first: nobody likes talking about the minutiae of the film industry quite like people in the film industry. Does the man on the Clapham omnibus care about contractual wranglings for spec scripts? Does he know what the choice between directors Parker Finn and Owen Kline might connote? Is he invested in a Golden Globes awards campaign? No, no, and no: but the question, really, is whether The Studio can make him care, or whether this is just a workplace comedy where paper salesmen are replaced by preening thespians or theoretical physicists by vulgar development bods. And this is where Rogen’s everyman charm comes in. Matt is no creative genius (in fact, his rise to studio head is somewhat inexplicable), nor is he an object of respect or reverence in his community. People suck up to him to get their films made, so Matt’s ego remains delicate and in need of fluffing. “He’s a very fragile and vindictive man,” comes Sal’s judgment. “And I say that as his best friend.” In the land of superheroes and sex symbols, these are very human feelings.
The Studio plays out as a fast-paced (almost relentlessly fast) farce. Episodes lampoon specific elements of the industry, from delivering notes to directors to approving trailers and posters. But they pay homage to the filmmaking styles being depicted: an episode set during filming of a big one-shot finale is filmed in a single take (like Adolescence), while the mystery of a missing film reel on Olivia Wilde’s Chinatown knock-off unfolds as a film noir pastiche. The self-contained nature of the episodes (and a lack of over-arching plot threads) makes them a bit hit-and-miss, and, naturally, the self-deprecating charm does occasionally stray into indulgence (was Entourage “too close to home to enjoy?”, an oncologist asks Matt). But the cynicism is infectious, the bumbling buffoonery a winning formula. Rogen is on great form, but the best lines are offered to Barinholtz’s Sal. “I hope this doesn’t sound crass,” he tells a writer pitching a Kool-Aid script, “but I feel like I just got double-stuffed by Walt Disney and Aaron Sorkin”.
The Studio wastes scant time on interiority. Its characters have little or no life beyond the walls of their decadently revamped office. This is about monomania: personal and societal. But Rogen and Goldberg (and their team of writers) deliver a comedy that is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and even if it’s short on tenderness or social critique, it has that big, bustling kinetic energy associated with the high points of knockabout cinema. Television’s occupation of film’s traditional territory might not be over, but perhaps this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
