It’s enough to induce sympathy for the inhabitants of executive suites of Hollywood studios. The Oscars were once again swept up by the cheap and artful independent sector. Now comes a comedy that puts the boot even further into the creatively moribund major studio end of the movie business.
It’s hardly the first. Of late, there was the lame Judd Apatow Covid-era Netflix movie The Bubble. Last year came the Armando Iannucci-Sam Mendes-produced HBO series The Franchise, which, mercifully, was cancelled after one unfunny season.
And now comes The Studio, from one-time Apatow cast regular Seth Rogen and producing partner Evan Goldberg. They are oddly qualified, having been responsible for films that begged the question: how did this ever get made?
Strangely though, The Studio is a mostly great, amusingly indulgent, impressively cinematic in look – it’s a show that certainly likes its extended one-shots – but thankfully television-minded in its taut half-hour episodes.
When it comes to inside-Hollywood meta comedies Rogen and Goldberg have form. In their movie This is the End from 2013, Rogen and buds played themselves and found that comedy stardom left them ill-equipped to survive an apocalypse.
The following year, The Interview ‒ their comedy about an assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ‒ sparked the hack of Sony Pictures and a demand for Rogen to tone it down.
There’s a please-tone-it-down storyline in one episode of The Studio. It involves zombies and explosive diarrhoea and a trailer for a film starring Johnny Knoxville. Yes, it’s dumb but it’s part of a clever story in which Rogen’s studio boss Matt Remick gets into an argument with other rich Los Angelinos at a charity bash about the importance of their respective careers. Sadly for Remick, they’re paediatric oncologists. He makes more money than they do and he’s happy to be a jerk of Larry David proportions about it.
Remick has risen to be head of production at the historic Continental Studios after his boss Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara) is fired by CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston channelling old-school movie moguls such as Robert Evans). Remick’s a suit with delusions of artistic integrity, who got into the business because he loved movies. Now he’s the boss, he’d like to make some good ones. Only Mill first wants him to make the next Barbie out of another pop culture figure. In this case, the Kool-Aid Man, ad mascot of the powdered drink.
That brings in, for reasons best not spoiled, Martin Scorsese, as the first in a run of directors all apparently game to play heightened versions of themselves. Scorsese is hilarious, and so in various degrees are Ron Howard, Sara Polley and Olivia Wilde in subsequent episodes as they tolerate, indulge, or confront the bungling, increasingly insecure Remick.
The Studio is impressive in its scale and boldness. In one episode set at the Golden Globes, a story centred on Zoë Kravitz comes with a conveyor belt of cameos, including Netflix boss Ted Sarandos as himself giving Remick some useful advice.
The series milks some laughs with Remick’s nostalgia for a long-gone Hollywood golden age he never saw.
Yes, it’s Hollywood skewering Hollywood yet again but anyone with a lasting affection for The Larry Sanders Show, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm or Rogen himself will find much to like.
The Studio, Apple TV+, from March 26. Two-episode premiere then weekly episodes.
