Summary
The Studio marries genuinely funny satire with needlessly solid craft in Episode 4, creating a great-looking and hilarious half-hour.
There’s simply no reason for The Studio to be this good. If it were just a satire on the movie industry, it’d be funny and fine, and nobody would be upset about that. But take Episode 4, “The Missing Reel”, as an example. It’s a rich piss-take of precious auteurism and tight-fisted moviemaking that puts profits over artistry (think back to what Bryan Cranston said in the premiere) yet is better-looking, better-sounding, and better-acted than most feature films. It’s having its cake, eating it, and asking for seconds.
This probably won’t come as much of a surprise given how good the previous episode was. But “The Missing Reel” is just as good while also being fundamentally different. Like “The Oner”, it takes a single gimmick and blows it out to episode-length proportions, but the gimmick here is so good that the whole thing could work as a standalone short completely divorced from any broader context.
The gimmick is emulating a Chandleresque crime noir, since Olivia Wilde is directing one and shooting it on film, which Matt is a big fan of. When a reel of that movie goes missing, it kick-starts an investigation into its disappearance that casts Matt and Sal as two gumshoes who’re trying to track the reel down without upsetting any of the cast or damaging the studio’s reputation. Insurance would cover reshoots if the reel is declared officially missing — it depicts a climactic third-act shootout and a cameo from Wilde herself — but Matt doesn’t want that to happen because he thinks it’ll put filmmakers off shooting on film.
Because Matt is cold and has dyed his hair a shade too dark, he ends up wearing a trench coat and a Trilby hat from the wardrobe department, which makes him look like Philip Marlowe. And because the set is blanketed by a layer of pumped-in smoke, his voice his hoarse when he records his thoughts as audio notes, which his therapist has advised him to do when he starts spinning out. So, you’ve got Seth Rogen dressed as a ’30s private investigator providing dramatic hardboiled narration while Sal tries to prevent him from accusing Zac Efron of being a thief. It’s exactly as funny as it sounds.
But The Studio Episode 4 commits so wholeheartedly to the aesthetic that it often looks incredibly striking, like way more striking than it really needed to look to sell the idea. There are a few shots in “The Missing Reel” that you could frame and hang on your wall. But against this needlessly pretty backdrop is a genuinely hilarious farce wherein Matt has to hide in Zac Efron’s trailer and Sal hits on an important clue because of a heretofore unmentioned superpower of being able to identify any alcohol brand purely by its scent.
There’s some stuff about the inner workings of Hollywood that is illuminating, too. There’s a simmering undercurrent of resentment towards Matt because he refused to pay for a wrap party since shooting on film was so expensive, and Olivia Wilde turns out to be the thief because she was unhappy with the final scene and wanted to force the studio’s hand into a reshoot that she knew Matt wouldn’t foot the bill for. But she also wanted to keep the reel because she was so impressed by the quality of her own cameo. Olivia Wilde clearly has a better sense of humour than she’s given credit for, because she’s playing the kind of dementedly narcissistic version of herself here that most actors would shy away from.
But the real MVP is Ike Barinholtz. Also like “The Oner”, “The Missing Reel” does without any of the supporting cast and leaves Seth Rogen and Barinholtz to go it alone, but the latter has more to do here, essentially suffering a minor breakdown as Matt refuses to listen to him and continues to fixate on Zac Efron as a potential suspect. Everything he says is funny, especially stuff about how ridiculous Matt looks with his hair dyed, though that’s admittedly in service of a sad broader point about how the pressure of the job is causing Matt to become paranoid and lose himself.
But all’s well that ends well. After a ridiculous, protracted chase sequence, Olivia Wilde destroys the missing film, but she gets her reshoots anyway because Matt sells his preposterously ostentatious Corvette to Efron and pays for them out of pocket. As Matt is quickly realizing, in Hollywood, the directors always win. Luckily, with The Studio, so do we.
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