Television
The Studio, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s satire on Hollywood absurdity, shows how even the powerful are driven by their insecurities, fears and delusions. By Anthony Carew.
Cameos galore in Hollywood satire The Studio
When actor-writer-director Seth Rogen and his creative partner Evan Goldberg were hot young talents in the 2000s, they took a meeting to talk about a Monopoly movie. Not a dramatic exploration of industry consolidation and corruption but, rather, an adaptation of the board game. In the meeting sat the director attached to the project: Sir Ridley Scott.
That scenario – legendary Academy Award-winning director meets 20-something stoners to talk about turning a board game into a narrative film – is absurd to outsiders but business-as-usual in Hollywood.
The Monopoly movie has yet to make it to screens – although it’s still in development – but that long-ago meeting echoes throughout The Studio, a 10-episode comedy from Rogen and Goldberg that makes jokes about Jenga and Rubik’s Cube adaptations in its first 10 minutes.
Rogen plays Matt Remick, a lifetime film-biz suit who has finally landed his dream job: creative head of the fictional Continental Studios. Evoking classic Hollywood institutions such as Warner Bros. and Paramount, it’s the kind of La La Land landmark that buses in tourists to look at its iconic building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in his “Mayan revival period”. Not coincidentally, it’s a building that looks like a tomb.
Remick’s new gig involves navigating not only corporate dictates, studio politics and warring creative executives but an industry in decline. His rise coincides with the deaths of celluloid and the theatrical distribution model.
The ultimate goal for Remick and his motley crew of Continental execs – played, with much comic energy, by Catherine O’Hara, Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders, Kathryn Hahn and Dewayne Perkins – isn’t to make art but just to stay alive. The aim is to avoid the fate of another historical studio, MGM, and end up as an impulse purchase by Amazon.
The Studio takes a multifaceted view of Hollywood and all the different people and projects that populate “the Town”. The showbiz satire is usually a pretty rote, one-note genre, peddling tired stereotypes such as the money-grubbing producer, pretentious filmmaker and airhead actor. That was seen in the recent HBO show The Franchise, which, despite Armando Iannucci’s involvement, fell flat because it had only a solitary satirical target: superhero filmmaking.
The Studio never anchors itself to one production, instead mocking various elements of the business. One of its best episodes, “The Pediatric Oncologist”, is about Remick’s personal life, when dating a doctor who knows nothing about films (a brilliant Rebecca Hall turn) forces him to see how people in the normal world regard the work of a Hollywood suit.
That episode amplifies the show’s knowing depiction of how even someone in a powerful position is driven by their insecurities, fears and delusions. Remick believes, as one of the sacred few who decide what movies get made, that he’s an artist, even if, as Netflix chief executive Ted Sarandos warns him – in one of the series’ wild array of cameos – guys like them are just bean counters.
Remick may proclaim that he wants to helm great movies, but mostly he wants to be the “cool studio guy”, complete with vintage suits and cars. He harbours a desperate need to be liked by filmmakers and actors. Mostly they just tolerate him because he can do things – greenlight projects and approve expenses – they want done.
His hopes for credibility meet a crushing reality early on when his No. 1 priority, demanded by chief executive Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston, in a grotesque slapstick role), is to make a movie about Kool-Aid, the powdered beverage whose low-socioeconomic appeal means it may or may not be racially coded. This leads to a later episode, titled “Casting”, that satirises Hollywood’s love of performative progressiveness.
Remick’s initial inspiration, to take a Martin Scorsese project about the Jonestown massacre – the historical source of the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” – and make a credible take on cinematic brand-activation, proves a nonstarter. Scorsese dismisses Matt as “just another run-of-the-mill, faceless, talentless, spineless suit”.
The directing job falls to a more realistic candidate, Nicholas Stoller, a Hollywood journeyman who’s worked with Rogen since the 2001 post-Freaks and Geeks comedy Undeclared. Stoller gamely plays himself as a pure corporate hack, happy to accept any studio dictum, always ready to shirk responsibility and prepared to use AI to shave some money off the budget.
A huge promotional draw for The Studio is its countless cameos, with a host of stars joyously depicting themselves in an unflattering light. Dave Franco plays himself as the most annoying guy at the party, Greta Lee as a starlet using charm to get her demands met, Anthony Mackie as an inveterate people-pleaser, Paul Dano as self-serious thespian. And – with shades of Michael Cera’s all-time playing-yourself turn in Rogen and Goldberg’s This Is the End – Hollywood’s loveable grandfather, Ron Howard, is a vindictive prick who you don’t want to cross.
Olivia Wilde plays herself as a self-important auteur helming a troubled production that harbours delusions of grandeur. Squint and it’s not too hard to see the Don’t Worry Darling of it all. She’s directing (and cameoing in) a film called Rolling Blackout, a neo-noir that’s an obvious homage to Chinatown. In a neat bit of meta-storytelling, the episode itself, “The Missing Reel”, is played as a neo-noir, conversant in gumshoe conventions and featuring some unexpectedly beautiful downtown-LA filmmaking.
The meta-storytelling is at its most ambitious – and mocking of such ambitions – in the standout second episode, “The Oner”, in which Remick makes a set visit to a Sarah Polley movie shooting a climactic, ambitious single-take sequence at magic hour, with the entire 25-minute episode itself shot in an ambitious single-take sequence at magic hour.
Single takes are used extensively throughout The Studio, with most scenes shot in one sequence. The camera often madly navigates cacophonous spaces, trailing after Remick as he makes the poor choices that lead to cringe comedy, or steering into the chaos of the always-boozy Golden Globes (where the cameos run wild) or a Hollywood party in which the drugs flow a little too freely.
The approach of shooting scenes in whole, and being unable to cut freely between different coverage, meant the makers of The Studio could avoid a lot of studio notes from their real-life Apple TV bosses – a practice that gets its own satirical treatment in an episode titled “The Note”.
The specificity of the comedy – the way the writers seize on microaggressions, moments of awkwardness and displays of insecurity – is beautifully judged. Satire can struggle when its real-world target is so grandly ridiculous – and Rogen and Goldberg once made a goofy comedy (The Interview in 2014) that actually led to an international cyber attack and threatened a nuclear stand-off with North Korea.
The Studio succeeds by ignoring the big picture – well, save for when Remick brags that kids in cancer wards all watch movies. Instead, it burrows into the personal, knowing that, whether superstars or mere sausage-factory employees, the workers of Hollywood are still just human.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 26, 2025 as "Drinking the Kool-Aid".
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