The Studio is slyly self-aware about its shtick

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This article was published 05/04/2025 (512 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Here’s the paradox that powers all the best showbiz satires: Even when a work is surgically dissecting Hollywood’s mix of idiocy, excess and egotism, its tawdry tangle of money and fame, that same work will deliver a moment of such spectacular, transcendent movie magic that all will be forgiven.

The Studio, a new limited series streaming on Apple TV+, recognizes some of that crazy contradiction, being both a poison-pen letter and a swoony valentine to the film industry.

The show follows Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), newly appointed head of the fictional Continental Studios. Matt, a nice, neurotic and “desperately needy” guy, comes in with a starry-eyed belief in the importance of creative artists and original work, and his first assignment is to make a summer-tentpole, four-quadrant blockbuster based on the Kool-Aid brand.

As Matt’s ideals devolve into a series of compromises, failures and outright screw-ups, directors Rogen and Evan Goldberg, along with writers Alex Gregory, Peter Huyck and Frida Perez, somehow deliver a clever, comic, super-cynical industry takedown that is also unexpectedly earnest and sweet about the possibilities of cinema.

The Studio is slyly self-aware about its own genre. It picks up on many of the tricks and tropes that have made movies-about-movies popular with insiders and everyday audiences ever since things kicked off with 1928’s Show People.

The eight-episode season is packed with cameos and callbacks. While The Studio doesn’t come close to the 65 cameo appearances in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), it does a lot with what it’s got. Ron Howard, frequently described as “the nicest guy in Hollywood,” gets to explode that persona in a hilariously mean-spirited, foulmouthed drop-in.

Look for Zoë Kravitz, Olivia Wilde, Anthony Mackie, Aaron Sorkin, Sarah Polley and Ice Cube. At one absolutely excruciating point, Matt makes the 82-year-old Martin Scorsese weep.

There are cineaste in-jokes about “40-take Fincher” and A24 horror movies being seen only by “pansexual mixologists who live in Bed-Stuy.” And there are loads of movie references, from Chinatown to Weekend at Bernie’s. There’s a sneaky reference to The Player. The character of Griffin Mill (played with anarchic comic glee by Bryan Cranston) takes the name of the man who would kill — literally — to be a studio head in Altman’s story.

The Studio is also making more serious points. Showbiz satires tend to zero in on the movie business’s historical stress-points — the end of the silent era, the breakdown of the studio system, the shift toward multi-platforming, multinational corporate conglomerates.

Rogen and Goldberg and the scripters are clearly reacting to today’s issues — the Hollywood hamster-wheel of sequels, franchises and remakes, the bizarre uses of “Intellectual Property,” the creepiness of AI.

But the larger problem looming over The Studio is the threat to the whole theatre-going experience, as streaming services, often owned by giant tech companies, grab an ever-growing share of the attention economy.

That brings up a new showbiz-satire paradox. The Studio laments the death of the movies from the vantage point of Apple TV+. This is a limited series on a streaming service that makes fun of limited series on streaming services. There are digs at Netflix and jokes about “TV people.”

Even as the characters are getting genuinely nostalgic about old-time movie palaces and the grain of real film, The Studio itself leans — perversely — into the pleasures of the couch-based viewing experience. Its delicious snack-sized, self-contained weekly episodes clock in around the 30-minute mark, and that’s a big part of the show’s appeal.

So what does that mean for the movies?

Cinema always seems on the verge of ending in the showbiz satire, as art and commerce fight to the death. Fortunately, while the genre has been around for almost a century, the movies haven’t ended yet. And there’s some optimism in this series, for all Matt’s disasters, disappointments and Kool-Aid-related moral and creative concessions.

As he says, “When it all comes together and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.” Matt means it, and so does the show.

alison.gillmor@ freepress.mb.ca