Summary
In its premiere, The Studio works as a satire, but only because there’s an earnest affection for Hollywood underpinning its chummy gimmickry. That has to remain present for the show to have legs.
At one point in Episode 1 of Apple TV+’s Seth Rogen-helmed Hollywood satire The Studio, the former head of Continental Studios, Patty (Catherine O’Hara), gives the protégé who inherited her job a pep talk about how Hollywood will trample his dreams, stress him out, and possibly even ruin his life. But he’ll also, she tells him, make a great movie, and when he does, it’ll all be worth it. This is the show in microcosm. Its two-part premiere – a 45-minute opener titled “The Promotion” and a half-hour Episode 2 titled “The Oner” – is a chaotic farce underpinned by an earnest love of movies and moviemaking.
Patty’s protégé is Rogen’s character, Matt Remick, who in Episode 1 secures a promotion to become the head of Continental Studios, with a mandate passed down from its CEO (Bryan Cranston, Your Honor, Breaking Bad) to make as much money as possible with lowest-common-denominator artless rubbish. This is an intolerable idea to Remick, a purist who believes, naively, that great art can be commercially viable and is determined to prove it, despite his first project being to get a Kool-Aid movie off the ground.
Initially, it seems like Remick is going to be an underdog character who pulls off the impossible, but it quickly becomes obvious that he’s The Studio’s well-intentioned punching bag. Entirely by chance, Martin Scorsese – one of several high-profile cameos – pitches a screenplay about the Jonestown cult massacre, which, as you’ll know, is strongly associated with “drinking the Kool-Aid”. Remick thinks he can have his cake and eat it, too. But he’s too cowardly to pitch a risky movie associating Kool-Aid with murderous cult leaders and starring Steve Buscemi – another cameo – so he instead takes the easy way out and greenlights something that looks like a cross between The Emoji Movie and Inside Out written and directed by Nick Stoller.
To compound the indignity, he also has to justify impulsively spending $10 million on the Scorsese screenplay, so he pretends it was just to kill it off and protect the Kool-Aid brand, ruining Scorsese’s final movie, reducing him to tears, and getting himself kicked out of a party thrown by Charlize Theron (all together now – another cameo.)
In many ways, Remick is the equivalent of Himesh Patel’s character in HBO’s The Franchise, someone who hates the compromises he’s forced to make but still fundamentally loves the insidious, ridiculous business of Hollywood. In its premiere, The Studio is tasked with getting this across in various ways, some of them obvious and some of them subtle, like Remick taking a couple of hours in the evening to marvel at Goodfellas to make him feel better about the Scorsese thing. He means well, but he hasn’t yet become calloused and cynical like Patel’s character. It makes him hard to dislike, even though he’s conflict-averse to the point of outright cowardice and desperate for recognition to the extent that he ruins everything he touches.
Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, Chase Sui Wonders and Seth Rogen in The Studio | Image via Apple TV+
Nowhere is this more evident than in Episode 2 of The Studio, which is built around an ambitious one-take shot in a new Sarah Polley movie that Remick finds himself on set for. He’s so earnestly enthusiastic about the idea of a oner that it’s almost painful to watch him continuously mess up Polley’s, an effect compounded by the genius decision to frame the entire episode itself as a single uninterrupted take. With Netflix’s Adolescence having only recently brought the storied technique back to the forefront of the public consciousness, it’s fascinating to see another take on how the gimmick can be utilized to brilliantly creative effect.
But I nonetheless liked Episode 2 less than the first. Even though The Studio is a sitcom at its core, the breezier half-hour runtime leaves less space for Remick’s team to steal scenes, especially the studio’s marketing chief, Maya (an absolutely demented Kathryn Hahn, as seen in Tiny Beautiful Things), who shows up for a couple of scenes in Episode 1 and basically walks off with the show. Remick’s right-hand man, Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz, as seen in Snatched, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), is ever-present in the premiere but in the second instalment mostly just follows Remick around, which is a shame since the fact we met him taking coke bumps to deal with being overlooked for the promotion that Remick got suggested a bit more of an antagonistic edge.
It seems obvious that from here, The Studio will settle into this crisis-of-the-week format, largely wiping the slate clean between episodes. If the individual gimmicks are as strong as in “The Oner”, that’ll be fine, but the second the show starts to coast on the appeal of the cameos, which it’s very dense with, that’s where it’ll run into problems. There’s an underlying chumminess to this depiction of Hollywood that’ll only work if there’s some real teeth to the satire, otherwise, it’ll just become a back-patting self-congratulatory circle jerk, which is the opposite of the point. Rogen and co. must tread carefully, but there’s something about the sheer enthusiasm and underlying earnestness of this premiere that makes me think it’ll all turn out okay.
