Apple TV+’s „The Studio“ is a well-structured but repetitive sitcom about a studio chief who’s out of his depth
Is there a major comic actor who purely loves movies more than Seth Rogen?
In Hollywood history, there may be comedians with better track records (though Rogen’s is well above average, both in his comic vehicles and his occasional forays into serious-actor respectability). But it’s hard to think of anyone who seems so excited to be making cinema, whether enlisting David Gordon Green to bring both indie lyricism and ’80s action-comedy violence into the stoner buddy comedy “Pineapple Express” or staging a full-scale apocalypse with dozens of stars playing themselves in “This Is the End,” his directorial debut alongside longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg.
Now Rogen and Goldberg, alongside co-creators Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez have undertaken one of their most ambitious projects yet with “The Studio.” It’s a satire of the contemporary and constantly imperiled Hollywood machine, shot in richly cinematic textures and a series of uninterrupted takes, featuring an ensemble packed with both stars in major roles and in playing-themselves cameos. Naturally, it’s a streaming TV series that will never be shown on the big screen that its characters so cherish.
Though the show’s streaming status also works as one more layer of satire — for these characters, the very idea of being acquired by a “tech company” is hellish torture — Rogen and Goldberg also have the episodic bona fides that many similarly ambitious streaming projects do not. The episodes, which mostly hover around the half-hour mark, are well structured and strongly conceptualized, which makes sense from a technical point of view; when almost every individual scene is constructed as a single take, they need to do more than just usher along a poky master plot. These sequences need to move — and they do, sometimes to the point of exhaustion.
The show follows the promotion and rocky tenure of Matt Remick (Rogen), a longtime development executive appointed to run Continental Studios now that his former boss and mentor Patty (Catherine O’Hara) has been ousted by owner Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston, in a recurring role).
