The Studio Review: Seth Rogen's Showbiz Comedy Has Serious Star Power, But Falls Short On Laughs
Movies about movies have been a storied Hollywood tradition for decades now, and TV shows about movies have been catching up in recent years, exposing the chaotic reality behind what we see on the silver screen. But as HBO learned the hard way with last year's swiftly cancelled comedy The Franchise, showbiz stories don't always connect with viewers. And that may end up being the case for Seth Rogen's new Apple TV+ comedy The Studio — premiering Wednesday, Mar. 26; I've seen the first four episodes — which offers some fun moments and cool celebrity cameos... but may be too much of an inside joke for people to care.
Rogen stars as studio executive Matt Remick, an idealist who's dedicated to preserving the art of cinema, but usually gets ignored on movie sets. After his boss gets fired, though, he's installed as the new head of the studio. He starts out with aspirations to make the next great American film, but instead, he finds himself caught in a tug-of-war between pretentious directors, self-involved actors and craven money men, while he's forced to endure endless meetings about a movie based on... the Kool-Aid Man.
The Studio effectively captures all the glad-handing, backslapping and bulls–tting that's prevalent at every Hollywood movie studio, with plenty of foul-mouthed insults and fake laughs. (Rogen and his writing partner Seth Goldberg co-created the series with Veep vets Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory.) The scripts are spiked with sharp showbiz jabs, with inspired riffs on Steve Buscemi's marketability and the Kool-Aid Man's, um, genitalia. We also get a host of cameos from legendary filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard and big-name actors like Zac Efron and Anthony Mackie.
Matt's affection for classic cinema is endearing, and The Studio is heavily steeped in film history... but maybe too steeped. Storylines hinge on arcane cinematic terms like "the magic hour oner," and you'll need an encyclopedic knowledge of film history to catch all the jokes. It's all a bit self-indulgent, like Rogen and his pals wrote something to make themselves giggle and didn't worry about who else would get it. The pace is frenetic as well, with lots of breathless walk-and-talks set to a frantic jazz score, a la the Oscar-winning film Birdman, and it all gets exhausting after a while.
It's never as funny as I wanted it to be, either. It's amusing in places, but not laugh-out-loud hilarious, even when it strains to be that with over-the-top physical comedy. It never really sharpens its knives and digs into Hollywood in a way that draws blood. Plus, the stakes aren't very high here: Matt has no life outside his job, so there's no emotional tether. (For all of Entourage's flaws — and there were many — it did establish a genuine bromantic bond between Vinny Chase and his friends that withstood all the celebrity ups and downs.) It's oddly old-fashioned, too: It doesn't grapple with the new streaming era in any meaningful way, and it feels like it could've been written 20 or 30 years ago with not many changes.
Rogen has a few funny moments as Matt, perpetually frazzled by the stresses of the job, and Ike Barinholtz does have great comedic chemistry with him as Matt's coke-sniffing executive pal Sal. Kathryn Hahn, though, truly steals the show as the studio's terminally trendy head of marketing Maya; every time she's on screen, the comedy ceiling goes up several notches. (Catherine O'Hara and Bryan Cranston also make welcome cameos, but they don't stick around very long.) Still, I could never shake the feeling that The Studio was made for a very narrow audience, and doesn't do much more for that audience than congratulate it for how well it knows Hollywood. As Barinholtz's character Sal says about Matt's insistence on getting a one-take shot in a movie, "audiences do not care about this s–t"... and I'm kind of afraid he might be right about that.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Seth Rogen's showbiz satire The Studio has lots of cool cameos, but gets too caught up in Hollywood lore to be consistently entertaining.