Midway through the first season of “The Studio,” Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), a big wheel in the movie industry, finds himself at a dinner table of civilians. Though he’s used to impressing people with his job, his companions are unmoved. “If you want art, you watch TV,” one says. “Have you seen ‘The Bear’?”
To borrow a line from “The Sopranos,” one of the first big series to muscle in on the movies’ territory, Matt is feeling like a guy who came in at the end of something. When the 10-episode satire begins on Apple TV+, he gets his dream job, as he is tapped to head the fictional Continental Studios when its storied leader (Catherine O’Hara) is defenestrated after a string of flops.
Matt, a movie guy’s movie guy whose vintage-car collection embodies his love for an earlier showbiz era, is ready to live his Hollywood fantasy. He will lavish money on auteurs and let them shoot on actual film. He will be known as a “talent-friendly” executive. He will make art.
Or maybe he won’t. Seconds into his welcome-aboard talk with the company’s C.E.O., Griffin Mill (a deliciously batty Bryan Cranston), he gets his first mandate: Continental has landed the rights to the Kool-Aid Man, a crass ploy to copy the success of “Barbie,” and Matt is expected to turn the I.P. into a billion-dollar hit. He dreamed of a life in the pictures; now he’s breathing life into a pitcher.
“The Studio,” which premieres on Wednesday, is its own kind of formula project, another in that long-lived monster-movie franchise “Art vs. Commerce.” But the series is timely enough to be a little distinctive, and it knows its business well enough to be blisteringly entertaining.
Past Hollywood stories have cast the industry as a culturally powerful meat grinder (Cranston’s character name is an allusion to “The Player,” one of many classic-film references in the series), or as affluent but brainless, as in “Entourage.” But in “The Studio,” Hollywood is in deep decline.
It is beset by TV and tech competitors. (The irony that Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Alex Gregory, Peter Huyck and Frida Perez have created this series for Apple is between them and their management teams.) It is getting squeezed for every drop by mega-conglomerates. Is it still a place for art? Occasionally. Is it one more part of a multimedia support system for brands like the sugar-water pitchman at the heart of Matt’s new movie? Oh yeah!
This perspective makes “The Studio” simultaneously more bleak and more sentimental than many of its predecessors. Matt’s love for the New Hollywood films and directors of his youth is genuine, and “The Studio” shares it. One caper-like episode is modeled on “Chinatown”; another is devoted to the shooting of a “oner” — a single long shot, like the Copacabana scene in “Goodfellas” — a flourish that the shooting of the episode reproduces.
To utterly savage this industry and its protagonist, “The Studio” seems to feel, would be punching down. Matt is too compromised to be a hero but too needy and weak to be a monster. Rogen gives an Albert Brooksian performance, self-regard and self-hatred layered over a base state of anxiety. The direction underscores his state of mind with long, jittery takes that build a sense of frenzy; the soundtrack is a panic attack of drums and cymbals.
Rather than a takedown, “The Studio” becomes a foulmouthed cringe comedy, as Matt and his lieutenant Sal (Ike Barinholtz) court, and inevitably offend, the stars they need to rebuild Continental’s slate. Celebrity cameos can be the death of satire — how do you take the gloves off with stars who are doing you a favor by showing up? But the choices are mostly story-serving and well-deployed, among them Martin Scorsese, Olivia Wilde and a very un-Opie-esque Ron Howard.
As in showbiz satires like “The Larry Sanders Show,” it’s the regular cast members who carry the story. Kathryn Hahn is a dynamo as a marketing exec unencumbered by Matt’s guilt over selling out; O’Hara strikes the opposite contrast as Matt’s high-minded predecessor who, having been fired and become a producer, may be the luckiest person in the whole outfit.
“The Studio” lives and breathes moviemaking, putting its studio-lot locations to good use, but its true focus is on how movies are made and ruined off the set, in marketing meetings, casting brainstorms and publicity tours. In an early moment, Matt’s team pitches their tent-pole movie project with nothing but a video of the Kool-Aid man doing a viral dance. If you want a picture of the future of Hollywood, imagine a brand mascot stamping out TikTok moves — forever.
When “The Studio” is funny, it is funnier than most anything on TV now. It has a doomed momentum, each episode accelerating toward disaster like a golf cart toward a craft-service table. When it flags, it’s partly because it chooses so many targets to spoof that it loses sight of its serial story line — the future of a studio hanging on the fate of an anthropomorphized beverage container — and the stakes and pathos that follow from it.
At its best, though, “The Studio” is proof that even in an era of algorithmic knockoffs, the movies can still make you bark with laughter … if only on TV.
