Why you need to watch this ‘spot-on’, star-studded takedown of modern Hollywood

Launching on Apple TV+, a new film industry satire co-created by and starring Seth Rogen nails the business – and features Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron and others as themselves.

A film studio head and his team of senior executives eagerly take their seats in a private screening room to watch the new Ron Howard movie for the first time. This is work for them, but they’re also beside themselves with anticipation. “I am so excited about watching this film!” says the boss. It’s going to be “perfect”.

The 10-part comedy stars Seth Rogen as Matt Remick, the beleaguered head of a struggling film studio whose efforts to balance commercial viability with artistic integrity invariably cause problems. The Studio is sharp, funny, stylishly filmed and Rogen is a major draw in his own right, but another reason for the excitement surrounding the show is its extraordinary array of Hollywood A-listers playing themselves. They include, among others, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Adam Scott, Olivia Wilde, Zoë Kravitz, Anthony Mackie, Charlize Theron, Steve Buscemi, Ice Cube, Zac Efron and Dave Franco.

Evan Goldberg, who co-created, co-directed and co-wrote the series with his childhood friend and long-time creative partner Rogen, says in the production notes for the show that, except for two who remain nameless, every actor or director they approached to play themselves was up for it: “People’s only real question was, ‘What’s my joke?’ ‘What do I get to do?’.” The stars taking part do have some excellent jokes and several of these big names are sending themselves up mercilessly. If there was an Emmy for “best sport”, Kravitz would be a shoo-in for her antics in one episode when she accidentally gets high on drugs. 

Rogen’s Remick is an executive who has worked at the fictional Continental Studios for 22 years. He’s a movie nerd; the sort of cinephile who will bend your ear about the incredible funeral shot in 1960s political epic Soy Cuba or wax lyrical about the “magical” properties of real film stock. He relaxes by watching Goodfellas for the millionth time. He yearns to make the next Annie Hall or Rosemary’s Baby. He loves being around actors and directors and is desperate for their approval but as a studio guy – a suit, a bean-counter – the creatives only ever want to keep him at arm’s length. Instead of hanging out with Hollywood’s coolest, he has to take meetings with the Rubik’s Cube people and the Jenga people because Continental is focused on making trashy popcorn movies with “known brands”. 

When the Continental head is fired after a string of box office bombs, the unpredictable CEO, Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston), selects Matt to replace her. Mill has secured the movie rights to Kool-Aid, the soft-drink mix. He reasons that if a Barbie film can make a billion dollars for Warner Bros, Matt should be able to make money from a movie about the Kool Aid man, the drink’s animated marketing mascot. Matt sets to work in the belief that prestige films and box office hits are not mutually exclusive but in a world where TikTok trends dictate film-making decisions, he’s quickly forced to question that ideal.

He has a major problem in that he can’t square his admiration for cinema legends with the need to make hard-nosed business decisions. He can’t bring himself to tell Ron Howard that the last act of his latest movie sucks. He can’t break it to Martin Scorsese that the studio won’t be making his script about cult leader Jim Jones. 

The Studio is actually exactly the sort of show that a movie nut like Matt would love watching. There are enough easter eggs and in-jokes to delight the most knowledgeable of film fans. For example, the episode about Olivia Wilde making a neo-noir detective film which one character says “sounds like a rip-off of Chinatown” features several references to the Roman Polanski classic. The instalment that revolves around director Sarah Polley’s attempt to capture an elaborate “oner” – a long, single shot – is itself cleverly shot to look like one long take; indeed, much of the series is shot in long takes, giving it a fly-on-the-wall feel. Griffin Mill is also the name of the main character in another Hollywood satire, Robert Altman’s aforementioned 1992 film The Player. 

It was while rewatching beloved TV series during lockdown that Rogen had the idea for a series similar in tone and style to the hit 90s sitcom The Larry Sanders Show, which was set behind the scenes of a late-night talk show, but about the film industry rather than television. Rogen and Goldberg and the rest of the writing team (Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez) drew on their own experiences in the business as fuel for the storylines. According to the production notes, key to Matt’s character was Rogen and Goldberg’s memory of a studio executive telling them: “I got into this business because I love movies, and now my job is to ruin them” – a line that has made it into the show almost unchanged.

Another classic show Rogen rewatched during lockdown was The Sopranos. Matt Remick does not have a huge amount in common with mob boss Tony Soprano but they do share one thing – a fear that they’ve arrived at the party too late. In the opening episode of The Sopranos, Tony, who has been suffering from panic attacks, tells his therapist of his “work”: “Lately, I’ve been feeling that I came in at the end. That the best is over.” Similarly Matt worries that the golden age of cinema has passed. In episode one, he tells the boss he’s replaced, Patty (Catherine O’Hara): “I’m anxious, I’m stressed out, panicking pretty much all the time.” The Continental office was built as a temple to cinema but, says Matt, “it feels much more like tomb”. Matt’s film-loving assistant Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders) thinks she’s “30 years too late” to the industry. 

The decline of cinema in the form of the old-school film studios, as the streaming services become ever more successful, is an underlying theme throughout the series. There’s a danger that Continental is going to be bought by Amazon. Ted Sarandos, the co-head of Netflix, has a cameo, stealing the limelight at an awards ceremony. An exasperated Scorsese wants Matt to give him back his script so he can go sell it to Apple “the way I should have done in the first place”.

Of course, the demise of Hollywood has been predicted almost since the first studio opened its doors. Legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht recalled walking around Hollywood in 1951 with David Selznick, the movie mogul who made Gone with the Wind, as Selznick insisted that movies were over and done with. “Hollywood’s like Egypt,” he told Hecht. “Full of crumbled pyramids. It’ll never come back.” And yet three quarters of a century later, it’s still there. Several of The Studio’s exterior scenes pointedly frame the iconic Hollywood sign in the background of the shot.

Hecht had been lured to Hollywood from New York by his friend Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, who telegraphed him to say: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.”

The Studio leans into the notion that idiots are over-represented in Tinseltown. Matt’s team – Quinn, studio exec Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), and marketing maven Maya Mason (Kathryn Hahn) – are all lovable dolts. Griffin Mill is a lunatic of the first order.

But Hollywood has always been happy to poke fun at itself. Barton Fink (1991), The Player and Get Shorty (1995) are among the hits that have sent up Tinseltown. HBO’s show Entourage satirised the industry and The Studio comes hard on the heels of another HBO series, The Franchise, about the making of a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style movie. However, The Franchise, although hilarious, was scathing and it was cancelled after just one season. It’s difficult to know exactly why it failed to connect with a large enough audience although one reviewer found the show’s “constant cynicism” very wearing. In contrast, The Studio is affectionate. It has us rooting for Matt and Continental and maybe even for film-making as an artistic endeavour. 

After all, as Patty tells Matt: “One week you’re looking your idol in the eye and breaking his heart and the next week you’re writing a blank cheque for some entitled nepo baby in a beanie. But when it all comes together, and you make a good movie… it’s good forever.” You could say the same for TV shows. 

The Studio begins on Apple TV+ on March 26