スタジオ：セス・ローゲンの華麗なハリウッド風刺は自分自身を売り渡す。

Cinephilia, the ungainly term for loving films with which we must make do, has gained new life in the 2020s. The rise of Letterboxd, concurrent with the Covid lockdowns, has democratised film criticism and altered the way we view cinema. Being extremely into movies is no longer a niche hobby – it’s hot currency. In recent years, Tom Cruise has parlayed his deep, sincere love for cinema into top-tier PR spin and totally recharged his movie star power. And by opting for more thoughtful, artful projects, younger stars like Austin Butler and Mikey Madison are proving how much they value quality filmmaking over hawking some creatively bankrupt IP tentpole.

Now, we’ve been gifted two Hollywood send-ups in quick succession – HBO’s The Franchise, an ugly, laughless parody of Marvel filmmaking that committed the sin of wasting Lolly Adefope and the even greater sin of being written by Marina Hyde, was promptly cancelled. And then there’s The Studio, the brainchild of Seth Rogen and collaborators Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez, which arrived in March with far greater expectations and far more legitimacy.

Rogen is an unusual ferryman for a series about one man’s quest to keep quality cinema alive. His late-00s reign over the Judd Apatow brand of mid-budget comedy looks like high art compared to today’s lab-grown streaming fare, but Rogen was hardly an auteur. It means there’s an inescapable shimmer of hypocrisy hanging over The Studio. You can’t help but watch it with Rogen’s filmography – The Green Hornet, Sausage Party and Mufasa: The Lion King – all perched, devil-like, on your shoulder. The character he plays, film studio boss Matt Remick, may exalt Scorsese and GoodFellas, but the actor isn’t exactly in the business of making films that owe even the slightest debt to those influences.

The main issue with The Studio is that it peaks in its first half hour. Having Scorsese, a mesmerically good actor who needs to be cast more, appear as himself to get bullshitted around by Remick was borderline genius. Twisting the director’s Jonestown movie idea into a Barbie-style IP tentpole for Kool-Aid, then dropping him (and Steve Buscemi) was beyond inspired. An entire episode about Hollywood execs directly mishandling the final film by one of the greatest living filmmakers for the sake of a juice drink tie-in is exactly the high bar The Studio should have cleared every episode. Instead, we got diminishing variations of the idea – after Scorsese, it was Sarah Polley, then Ron Howard, then Olivia Wilde, then Parker Finn et al. There are some great jokes in all of the above (in particular, Wilde drawing on the Don’t Worry Darling furore by portraying herself as outright villainous), but a distinct lack of direction. 

If the ‘director of the week’ format starts to wear thin, the final two episodes’ descent into pure stoner farce is worse – it feels like a crutch and only affirms any concerns about Rogen overseeing a series with as much potential as this. The volume gets louder, the pratfalls are more liberally deployed, and it all starts to feel extremely lazy. The sharp tang of its first couple of episodes has been replaced with something softer and sillier, and less becoming. That final scene in the pilot, of Remick and his right-hand man Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), guiltily watching GoodFellas after making Martin Scorsese cry, feels very distant. 

This isn’t to say The Studio is a bust – it is often hysterically funny. It does occasionally circle back to something more barbed; namely, in the episode where Remick and his panicked execs debate the racial optics of their cast. And though the material gets increasingly safe, it is still material being sold by comedy heavyweights like Catherine O’Hara and Kathryn Hahn. It’s sharply directed, too – the long takes, while best used in the episode specifically about shooting a long take, are impressive, and it’s the rare streaming series that actually looks good. The Studio is maybe the easiest watch of the year, the episodes blurring by. But after its brief, insubstantial finale, it feels too settled, having bared its teeth early on, then retracted them for easier, victim-free targets like the pageantry and behind-the-scenes to-ing and fro-ing of awards ceremonies.

The moment it was clear The Studio would never truly upset the Hollywood apple cart was when Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos appeared as himself – on a rival streaming platform, no less! – at the series’ fictitious Golden Globes. While Netflix sweeps the fictional awards ceremony, Sarandos is fictionally showered with fictional praise by real actors in their fictional speeches (later revealed to be for contractual reasons, har har) and he is, of course, treated with kid gloves. Yes, Sarandos is one of the most influential power players in Hollywood and someone keen to ensure no film ever premieres in a cinema again – but look, he referred to himself as a “bean counter” and actors as “artists”. 

It’s confirmation enough that there is nothing at stake in The Studio; The Rehearsal this is not. And in positioning Remick as a parallel to Sarandos – they’re just two men who adore cinema and simply want the best for the industry – the show feels less like a witty parody of contemporary Hollywood and more like back-patting damage control. According to the show’s murky thesis, people like Remick and Sarandos wouldn’t be greenlighting films like Kool-Aid or Netflix’s The Electric State if they had a choice! But the post-Covid moviegoing recovery has continued like gangbusters – from Barbie and Oppenheimer to Wicked and Sinners – so the desire for something that isn’t pure slop is there. It’s difficult to swallow The Studio’s argument that execs are only following current trends and not setting them. 

In the series’ final episode, Remick’s inebriated boss (Bryan Cranston) is unable to complete an on-stage speech, so he and the gang turn his first word – “Movies!” – into a celebratory chant. “Movies! Movies! Movies!” they cheer in unison. When in doubt, play into people’s love for movies; it is, after all, why we’re all here. That’s exactly what The Studio did – while it distracted us with some very funny celebrity cameos and timely references to A24 and The Town With Matthew Belloni, it operated as a substantial bit of Hollywood reputation laundering. And it worked like a charm, because we’re still at the point where chanting, “Movies! Movies! Movies!” is enough. 

The Studio season one is available to stream on Apple TV+ now. 

Cinephilia, the ungainly term for loving films with which we must make do, has gained new life in the 2020s. The rise of Letterboxd, concurrent with the Covid lockdowns, has democratised film criticism and altered the way we view cinema. Being extremely into movies is no longer a niche hobby – it’s hot currency. In recent years, Tom Cruise has parlayed his deep, sincere love for cinema into top-tier PR spin and totally recharged his movie star power. And by opting for more thoughtful, artful projects, younger stars like Austin Butler and Mikey Madison are proving how much they value quality filmmaking over hawking some creatively bankrupt IP tentpole.

Now, we’ve been gifted two Hollywood send-ups in quick succession – HBO’s The Franchise, an ugly, laughless parody of Marvel filmmaking that committed the sin of wasting Lolly Adefope and the even greater sin of being written by Marina Hyde, was promptly cancelled. And then there’s The Studio, the brainchild of Seth Rogen and collaborators Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez, which arrived in March with far greater expectations and far more legitimacy.

Rogen is an unusual ferryman for a series about one man’s quest to keep quality cinema alive. His late-00s reign over the Judd Apatow brand of mid-budget comedy looks like high art compared to today’s lab-grown streaming fare, but Rogen was hardly an auteur. It means there’s an inescapable shimmer of hypocrisy hanging over The Studio. You can’t help but watch it with Rogen’s filmography – The Green Hornet, Sausage Party and Mufasa: The Lion King – all perched, devil-like, on your shoulder. The character he plays, film studio boss Matt Remick, may exalt Scorsese and GoodFellas, but the actor isn’t exactly in the business of making films that owe even the slightest debt to those influences.

The main issue with The Studio is that it peaks in its first half hour. Having Scorsese, a mesmerically good actor who needs to be cast more, appear as himself to get bullshitted around by Remick was borderline genius. Twisting the director’s Jonestown movie idea into a Barbie-style IP tentpole for Kool-Aid, then dropping him (and Steve Buscemi) was beyond inspired. An entire episode about Hollywood execs directly mishandling the final film by one of the greatest living filmmakers for the sake of a juice drink tie-in is exactly the high bar The Studio should have cleared every episode. Instead, we got diminishing variations of the idea – after Scorsese, it was Sarah Polley, then Ron Howard, then Olivia Wilde, then Parker Finn et al. There are some great jokes in all of the above (in particular, Wilde drawing on the Don’t Worry Darling furore by portraying herself as outright villainous), but a distinct lack of direction. 

If the ‘director of the week’ format starts to wear thin, the final two episodes’ descent into pure stoner farce is worse – it feels like a crutch and only affirms any concerns about Rogen overseeing a series with as much potential as this. The volume gets louder, the pratfalls are more liberally deployed, and it all starts to feel extremely lazy. The sharp tang of its first couple of episodes has been replaced with something softer and sillier, and less becoming. That final scene in the pilot, of Remick and his right-hand man Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), guiltily watching GoodFellas after making Martin Scorsese cry, feels very distant. 

This isn’t to say The Studio is a bust – it is often hysterically funny. It does occasionally circle back to something more barbed; namely, in the episode where Remick and his panicked execs debate the racial optics of their cast. And though the material gets increasingly safe, it is still material being sold by comedy heavyweights like Catherine O’Hara and Kathryn Hahn. It’s sharply directed, too – the long takes, while best used in the episode specifically about shooting a long take, are impressive, and it’s the rare streaming series that actually looks good. The Studio is maybe the easiest watch of the year, the episodes blurring by. But after its brief, insubstantial finale, it feels too settled, having bared its teeth early on, then retracted them for easier, victim-free targets like the pageantry and behind-the-scenes to-ing and fro-ing of awards ceremonies.

The moment it was clear The Studio would never truly upset the Hollywood apple cart was when Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos appeared as himself – on a rival streaming platform, no less! – at the series’ fictitious Golden Globes. While Netflix sweeps the fictional awards ceremony, Sarandos is fictionally showered with fictional praise by real actors in their fictional speeches (later revealed to be for contractual reasons, har har) and he is, of course, treated with kid gloves. Yes, Sarandos is one of the most influential power players in Hollywood and someone keen to ensure no film ever premieres in a cinema again – but look, he referred to himself as a “bean counter” and actors as “artists”. 

It’s confirmation enough that there is nothing at stake in The Studio; The Rehearsal this is not. And in positioning Remick as a parallel to Sarandos – they’re just two men who adore cinema and simply want the best for the industry – the show feels less like a witty parody of contemporary Hollywood and more like back-patting damage control. According to the show’s murky thesis, people like Remick and Sarandos wouldn’t be greenlighting films like Kool-Aid or Netflix’s The Electric State if they had a choice! But the post-Covid moviegoing recovery has continued like gangbusters – from Barbie and Oppenheimer to Wicked and Sinners – so the desire for something that isn’t pure slop is there. It’s difficult to swallow The Studio’s argument that execs are only following current trends and not setting them. 

In the series’ final episode, Remick’s inebriated boss (Bryan Cranston) is unable to complete an on-stage speech, so he and the gang turn his first word – “Movies!” – into a celebratory chant. “Movies! Movies! Movies!” they cheer in unison. When in doubt, play into people’s love for movies; it is, after all, why we’re all here. That’s exactly what The Studio did – while it distracted us with some very funny celebrity cameos and timely references to A24 and The Town With Matthew Belloni, it operated as a substantial bit of Hollywood reputation laundering. And it worked like a charm, because we’re still at the point where chanting, “Movies! Movies! Movies!” is enough. 

The Studio season one is available to stream on Apple TV+ now.