The Studio is every Hollywood cinephile’s wet dream.
Across the show’s first season, showrunners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg take us on a wild, fun, cocaine-covered ride through modern-day Hollywood which, as some grumpy old-timers would say, “just isn’t what it used to be!” Each episode’s premise is so absurd — and, more importantly, absurdly Hollywood — that we are quickly swept up in the abundance of name drops, movie references, and if-you-know-you-know real-world drama.
A quick recap: Matt Remick (Rogen), a long-time Hollywood suit who’s dedicated his life to greenlighting movies (albeit at the expense of his personal life), finally gets his big break when he’s promoted to Head of Continental Studios. Matt, like most people, wants to be liked. But he really, really wants to be liked, to a point where his incessant need for everyone to find him cool gets in the way of his desire to make great movies, and not the fluff that most big studios today love churning out.
He axes Martin Scorsese’s gritty swan song about the Jonestown murders in favor of…the Kool-Aid movie, reducing the directing legend to tears when he breaks the news. He spends a meeting trying to figure out how to give Ron Howard a bad note, only for the historically mild-mannered director to lambast him in front of everyone. He and his team — a standout ensemble including Catherine O’Hara, Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, and Chase Sui Wonders — even waste an entire day debating whether the Kool-Aid cast is racially appropriate, only for the film to be booed anyway for using a hint of AI in the animation. “I got into all of this ‘cause I love movies,” Matt says sadly as he stares wistfully at the rolling Hollywood hills. “Now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them.”
Rogen and company give such a charmingly human performance in every episode that by the show’s insane finale (which includes a shroomed-up Zoë Kravitz, a beaten up Dave Franco, and Bryan Cranston being hoisted into the air on a cable wire wearing nothing but a blazer and some Spandex), we’re rooting for the people of Continental Studios to win. Don’t we want O’Hara’s Patty Leigh, heartlessly fired from her former job as Continental Studios’ head, get the recognition she deserves? Doesn’t Wonders’ ambitious, go-getting executive Quinn Hackett deserve to make great movies? And doesn’t Barinholtz’ coked-up executive Sal Silverstein deserve to have every famous person know his name?
The Studio nails its movie references and biting satire so well, it almost makes the Hollywood suits human, even likable — to the point where I’d catch myself rooting for the very people it’s skewering. While everyone at some point in their lives has been a Matt, desperate for everybody to like them and make something great, people as self-absorbed and insecure as Matt shouldn’t be calling all the shots in a big-time movie studio. His team, while delightful in their dysfunction, spend so much time bickering that it’s a miracle anything gets made at all.
And, because this is satire, and because both Rogen and Goldberg have been very public about how The Studio parodies very real movie executives, it’s disconcerting to realize that you’ve spent ten episodes cheering for the very people who are wrecking Hollywood from the inside. The Studio is a masterclass in parody: but it’s on us to recognize who we’re rooting for.
