Last year on HBO, a new series that took a satirical look at the behind-the-scenes mayhem of a franchise superhero movie premiered called The Franchise. Although it was met with good reviews, the audience never really materialized for the series and the cable outlet declined to renew it for a second season. Now it’s Apple TV+’s turn to mine comedy on the backlots of Hollywood with The Studio.
Seth Rogen stars as Matt Remick, the suddenly promoted head of Continential Pictures who, despite having a life long love movies and spending his entire career climbing the corporate ladder at Continental still finds himself amazingly out of his depth. Where The Franchise focused on the lower level moviemakers who found themselves at the mercy of the tumultuous whims of management, The Studio puts the spotlight on those executives and the fear and anxiety that drives their decisions. The result is one of the funniest new comedy series in the last couple of years.
The Studio owes much to HBO’s 1990s series, The Larry Sanders Show. Set behind the scenes of a popular late night talk show, that series didn’t depend so much on an insider’s knowledge of that show biz world – though such knowledge didn’t hurt, either – as it did on the clash of egos and insecurities of its characters. The show business setting was almost incidental even as cameos from real life celebrities, often sending up their celebrity, lent a verisimilitude to the proceedings. The same goes for The Studio. An upcoming episode where Matt’s insecurities unintentionally provoke a real life director with nice guy reputation into violence plays much funnier than if the scene just featured a fictitious director character. But even with the emphasis on character-driven comedy, the show is not above a cheap visual gag like one in a later episode lifted straight from Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety, only substituting out an orchestra in a passing bus for a marching band behind one character angrily stomping through the lot.
Rogen’s performance as the beleaguered studio head is the centerpiece of the show. Matt is torn between his love of movies and original stories and his corporate overlord’s demand for blockbuster films based on intellectual properties like Kool-Aid. Being an inveterate people pleaser is not the best quality to have in a position like being the head of a major studio, and much of the comedic tension of the series comes from him trying to square that circle anyway. The results are often cringely hilarious, though Rogen still gives Mat just enough humanity and pathos that you still find yourself rooting for him no matter how many times he shoots himself in the foot. Ike Barinholtz co-stars as high energy – i.e. coked-up – Sal, Matt’s best friend who got overlooked in favor of Matt’s promotion and who frequently butts heads with rising creative executive Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders). Kathryn Hahn as a crazed marketing executive and Catherine O’Hara as the Matt’s former mentor who was pushed out of the studio and now has a very lucrative sweetheart production deal with Continental are both wonderful, though criminally underused, supporting presences.
The cinematography on the show needs some special praise. Nearly all of the scenes play out as single shots, with the camera pacing around the characters adding a visual nervous energy. And as the series progresses, directors Rogen and Evan Goldberg find new ways to keep the camera on the characters as they race around the studio lot on golf carts, stalk through the halls of their offices, pace nervously around various public functions and appearances or move through showbiz Los Angeles. The work really brings the audience into the anxiety-riddled world of Matt and his fellow studio executives, all of whose anxiety will only grow across the show’s hilarious ten-episode season.
