Review: 'The Studio' is a good series that really might be good forever
The year's best new comedy series blissfully bites the Hollywood hand that feeds it. That's "The Studio," streaming its 10 half-hour episodes on Apple TV+, where creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg bust open a piñata of juicy inside jokes to enhance the tale of a film geek who gets his dream job running a studio, only to find that success means killing the thing he loves.
That dreamer is Matt Remick, played by a never-better Rogen in a role that fits his gift for blending farce with genuine feeling. Movies are in Matt's DNA, so when his former boss Patty Leigh (Catherine O'Hara, sublime) gets the axe at Continental Studios, he steps over her body to grab the gig dangled by Bryan Cranston as hilariously greedy company CEO Griffin Mill.
If you know Griffin Mill is also the name of the murderous studio exec played by Tim Robbins in Robert Altman's classic 1992 movieland satire "The Player," you're already ahead of the gleefully name-dropping game that "The Studio" is playing. No biggie even if you don't know, since Rogen and Goldberg, who direct every episode, are fired up by a comic momentum that won't quit.
Matt starts by building his own team. He promotes his hard-working assistant Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders, terrific) to the creative side, where his profit-first buddy Sal Saperstein (a likably smarmy Ike Barinholtz) holds sway along with marketing chief Maya Mason (a killer funny Kathryn Hahn), whose hardcore approach to hawking junk is a scary wonder.
In the first episode, Matt is tasked by Griffin to turn the Kool-Aid Man from the flavored drink into a Marvel-sized blockbuster. The studio owns the rights, so Matt offers the directing job to his idol, Martin Scorsese, who to Matt's horror wants to build a budget-busting three-hour-plus tragedy about Jonestown cultists who drank poisoned Kool-Aid.
To avoid career oblivion, Matt turns down the legend, which reduces the "Raging Bull" filmmaker to tears. Scorsese's comic turn is Emmy worthy, as is Ron Howard in a later episode when the nice-guy Oscar winner unleashes an F-bomb-throwing tirade against Matt for daring to give him a note demanding that an hour be cut from his most personal film. Ouch!
Rogen nails the pain Matt feels at playing beancounter to creatives who don't want him in their club. Later, on a date at a charity ball with a pediatric oncologist (Rebecca Hall), Matt defends his job against the elitist doc who thinks saving lives trumps making escapist pablum. The nerve!
"The Studio" is not afraid to show Matt being a jerk, and a desperate one at that. Whether he's blundering around ruining an intricate one-take shot on a Sarah Polley film set or begging Zoë Kravitz to thank him in her Golden Globe speech, Matt is vain to the max, but his pride in his job is un-faked. As his mentor Patty tells him, "When you make a good movie, it's good forever."
That's why repeat viewings of "The Studio" are fun, since you can catch things you missed the first time. Rogen and Goldberg know that movies are in crisis, what with pandemic theater closings, labor strikes, dwindled audiences and streaming competition. It's ironic that the biggest boost old-school movies have had in years comes from this streaming series.
Not all episodes are equal. Some even go off the rails, like the manic, shroom-fueled climax at the Cinemacon celebration in Vegas, where rumors spread that the studio is getting swallowed up by Amazon. Make no mistake: Hollywood is at a tipping point, and Rogen and his team of crazies are sending their own version of a postcard from the edge.
Bummer? No way. With this kind of hopeful exuberance and cathartic wit. I have a hunch that "The Studio" is a good series that really might be good forever.
