Hollywood, you could say, is one of the greatest ant colonies in history. Hundreds of workers (producers, assistants, writers, stylists, publicists) carry out their assigned tasks, all in service of their queen. That would be you, the audience, fed a royal jelly concocted of dream, fantasy, myth, popcorn, even delusion. Throughout the decades of this colony’s cultural dominance, the queen could be counted on to feast on new movie releases, week after week. But in the new century, her tastes have evolved: she now gorges—binges—on streaming platforms like Netflix and Max.
For all the ants know, she may wriggle free, crawl off and start a new hive, coddled by workers who’ll come up with the next White Lotus or Love Is Blind.
This is the joke built into The Studio, a new comedy series—a streaming comedy series, on Apple TV+—about a flailing movie company. It stars a terrific Seth Rogen as Matt Remick, newly appointed head of a film company called Continental. Matt is one panicked ant. His corporate boss Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston, looking like legendary producer Robert Evans if he slept in a toolshed) makes the promotion contingent on one thing: Matt has to deliver a blockbuster about . . . Kool-Aid.
This is an inspired, crazy concept for a Hollywood send-up — it instantly catapults The Studio high above and far beyond Unfrosted, Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix comedy about Pop-Tarts — but the show’s 10 episodes, which build to one farcical crisis after another, are generally more clever, and more knowing, than laugh-out-loud funny. On that score, Platonic, Rogen’s Apple TV+ sitcom with Rose Byrne, was better.
Remick’s days are one long, oxygen-depleting dash. He rushes from Continental’s headquarters (a mock Frank Lloyd Wright labyrinth done in Mayan style) to film locations to fan conventions and back again. But he loves this seat-of-the-pants, movie-mad existence — and so does The Studio, which embraces Hollywood for all its ruthless, backstabbing, neurotic, pill-popping, money-chasing messiness. Matt, a devotee of cinema both high (Chinatown) and low (Weekend at Bernie’s), kids himself with visions of a Kool-Aid movie that will take its place as the next Barbie, only starring an iced beverage that crashes through walls and delivers the line: “Oh, yeah!” He hardly has time, though, to articulate any doubts. With the bounding bounce of an unusually large puppy, he’s too distracted trying to win the love of his two masters, the Kool-Aid-obsessed Griffin and the moviegoing public.
Everyone else in the cast, among them Kathryn Hahn as a marketing exec and Ike Barinholtz as Matt’s righthand man (who wanted his job), races alongside Rogen, screaming, gushing, swearing, competing, elbowing, arguing. It’s a panting, punishing pace. Barinholtz, who has an explosively ecstatic moment when Ike becomes the belle of the ball at the Golden Globes, even pulls ahead of Rogen occasionally.
This endless, headlong energy can produce a caffeinated buzz that rises to the brain on little prickling bubbles of enjoyment. (That, of course, suggests soda. If I can come up with a similar image using Kool-Aid, I’ll get back to you.) And there’s something irresistible about the heady, mythic seductiveness of Hollywood, even if you happen to be watching a TV show playfully poking holes in those myths. Hollywood may be a bad apple, but it’s also a golden one—trash the place, you still end up glorifying it. That pleasurable little paradox can be traced as far back as the 1952 classic melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful, or as recently as 2022’s bilious Babylon.
Oddly enough, only one exception comes to mind of a movie that depicts Hollywood without a scrap of sentimentality: 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Nothing beats a Toon for cynicism.
As you make your way through The Studio’s 10 episodes, though, you may start to wish more effort had been put into digging down into the comedy inherent in that ridiculous Kool-Aid movie. That might have given the show more traction, grip or bite. Because, for all its busyness, The Studio tends to settle for smooth, unruffled sleekness, for inside jokes that wave and wink and nod at you in the audience, reassuring you that you, too, are an innie. The show is peppered with cameos by the A-list likes of director Martin Scorsese, Ice Cube, Jean Smart, Adam Scott, Dave Franco and Zac Efron. All of them are more than game to poke fun at themselves and their images — Zoë Kravitz is, in fact, wonderfully zany — but what else would anyone expect? Scorsese’s disquisition on Italian neorealism?
At times, the show feels like a big-tent circus overrun by jugglers and short of acrobats — you admire the precision and skill, but miss a sense of daring. One episode showcases a virtuosic but not terribly essential joke about that revered camera stunt, the long, seamless, continuous take. Another episode is just plain facile, as Matt and his team tie themselves into knots trying to assess the racial sensitivity (or insensitivity) of having Ice Cube play Mr. Kool-Aid. This is like one of Larry David’s torturous self-debates on Curb Your Enthusiasm, but without his perverse genius, his wheedling, preening hostility. It’s a half-hour or so of chickens clucking wildly and waiting for the sky to fall.
In the show’s most perplexing moment, you’re left to puzzle out how to react to Continental’s trailer for an upcoming Johnny Knoxville and Josh Hutcherson comedy: It’s about zombies who infect the living with projectile diarrhea. Is this supposed to be hilarious? Disgusting? Both?
The strongest, funniest episodes — by far — are about Matt’s adventures outside (to the extent that he can leave the office), as he struggles to assert and maintain his pride at two agonizing, humiliating events:
1) The Golden Globes, where he’s mortified by the prospect of Kravitz winning and not mentioning him in her acceptance speech (and disappointing his mother, who’s watching at home).
2) A medical fundraiser that he attends as the date of a pediatric oncologist (Rebecca Hall). He’s introduced to a string of condescending doctors, none of whom agree with him that movies (especially movies about zombies with potty issues) are as important to the planet as medicine. (Raise your hands if you agree with the doctors!) Rogen is at his best here: With his thick, nervous chortle and warm but anxious eyes, he’s a master of the slow burn and the suppressed but softly bruised ego.
Anyway, The Studio has enough talent to merit a second season — a sequel. That goes for Platonic, too.
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The Studio‘s first two episodes are now streaming on Apple TV+, with new episodes arriving weekly on Wednesdays through its May 21 finale.
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