Seth Rogen’s ‘The Studio’ Is the Exact Right Kind of Mean-Spirited

Extortion. Careers unceremoniously ended. Organizations led by sociopathic megalomaniacs. It’s kind of shocking how much TV crime dramas have in common with TV sitcoms about the film industry. Last fall, we got HBO’s The Franchise, a pessimistic look inside a contemporary fictional superhero property. And on March 26th, AppleTV+ will premiere The Studio, about a contemporary fictional film company. Though you might expect there to be a lot of crossover between the projects, the two are about as different as two prestige-y sitcoms set backstage in the movie business and released within six months of each other can actually be. And while The Studio is definitely taking a lot of big swings that a certain kind of viewer will like (I really did!), this is still a world in which The Franchise was canceled weeks after its season ended: The Studio’s swings might be too big.

Seth Rogen (also one of the show’s five credited creators) stars as Matt Remick. He’s been an executive at Continental Studios for decades, trying to shepherd projects he believes in but seemingly dismissed and forgotten by the filmmakers he’s supposed to liaise with. He hopes everything will change when he gets promoted to head of the studio, but painful compromises turn out to be a pretty big part of the job. Through the season, we get to know the key players in Matt’s orbit: VP Sal (Ike Barinholtz); marketing head Maya (Kathryn Hahn); Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders), the assistant Matt promotes to creative executive when he moves up the ladder; and Patty (Catherine O’Hara), a former studio head turned producer. Continental’s CEO, played by Bryan Cranston, is named Griffin Mill, so the echoes of Robert Altman’s The Player are very intentional. 

We also get glimpses of Continental’s slate of movies at various stages in the production process, allowing various industry luminaries to come through, Curb Your Enthusiasm-style, to play heightened versions of themselves. Ever wondered what it might look like for Martin Scorsese to pitch a movie to a studio head? For Olivia Wilde to spin out over a missing reel of film? For Ron Howard to solicit notes on his latest film? For Johnny Knoxville to negotiate how filthy the trailer for his new horror comedy can be before exhibitors will refuse to show it? For Zoë Kravitz to navigate an awards ceremony where she’s heavily favored to win? The Studio imagines all these situations and more.

Immediately, The Studio distinguishes itself with its singular visual choices. Each scene is shot on one camera in a single take, giving the show a propulsive urgency and capturing how high-strung all of the characters are, all of the time. The all-oners format already seems ambitious, and then you get to the second episode, titled “The Oner.” Matt and Sal visit the set of a movie called The Silver Lake, where writer-director Sarah Polley (as herself) is closing the film with a oner following star Greta Lee (as herself) through a party and out to her car. They will only have a couple of chances to get the shot at the golden hour; they also can’t just try again tomorrow because Greta will be in London working on Christopher Nolan’s next movie. Matt, who considers himself not just a financier of films but an artist in his way, is excited to witness this creative accomplishment in person. We also get a sense of both the artistry and the urgency because this entire half-hour episode is a oner (and since Polley disdains the whip pans of 1917 when Matt brings them up as an option here, we may reasonably assume The Studio’s creative team isn’t using them either). 

Everyone has to walk the narrow line of catering to Matt because of his position, while also making him shut up and get out of the way, and the tension ratchets up further and further as the golden hour drifts toward dusk. For a series-best episode to come up this early in the season is emblematic of the creators’ confidence.

The Studio is also noteworthy for its striking color palette. Though the show is set in the present day, costumes and sets conform to a very ‘70s range of autumnal shades. (As befits her superficial character, Maya is most on-trend with showy brand logos; with her bold prints, clingy knits and sassy neckerchiefs, Quinn looks like she could slide straight into Klute.) The main office building on the Continental lot, said to be a Frank Lloyd Wright design from his Mayan Revival period, is described as a “temple of cinema”; the uniformity of the characters’ wardrobes does give a bit of a cult feeling. Maybe Matt would feel more positive about the whole enterprise if he thought of it that way; he does admit to Patty, on his first day, that the “temple” feels more like a tomb. Regardless: not since the teals and golds of AP Bio has every frame of a show seemed so painterly.

Aside from the aesthetics, The Studio is everything a fan could want a 2025 satire of the film industry to be. The first episode revolves around Matt agreeing to champion the first outing of a potential franchise based on existing IP — something that’s easier to feel bullish about in a post-Barbie world. Unfortunately, the IP Continental has to work with is the powdered drink Kool-Aid, so Matt spends the rest of the episode trying to find a way to do it that’s smart and cool, not moronic and craven. (Spoiler: he fails.) When Matt dates an oncologist named Sarah (Rebecca Hall) and escorts her to a fundraising gala for her hospital, he is challenged to maintain his composure at a table full of doctors who blithely shrug that they haven’t seen a movie in a theater since the pandemic and think today’s real creative artists are making TV. An episode set entirely at the Golden Globes feels like the reason a show like this exists: to give the civilian viewer what feels like a deeply inside look at the mechanics of the industry. It also provides a triumphant peak for Sal, played by series MVP Ike Barinholtz (also killing it as a co-creator on Running Point).

I know I said that The Franchise and The Studio have a lot of differences, and I stand by that, but it’s also true that some knocks on one pretty much line up with knocks on the other. The targets here are pretty soft; a surprisingly substantial cameo from Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, for example, doesn’t even hint at his many controversies. There are only glancing mentions that part of what’s making Matt’s job so much harder and the movies so much worse are the demands of philistines at the studio’s parent corporation. Perhaps this is in deference to the philistines at AppleTV+’s parent corporation, engaged as it is in producing tech hardware and so divorced from the artistic process that it made an ad everyone yelled about so much last year that they had to pull it and apologize. 

Speaking of yelling: there’s a lot of that in The Studio too, as we join the characters on extremely stressful days, like the late-season episode set at CinemaCon in Las Vegas — and featuring an “old-school Hollywood buffet” of hallucinogenics — that devolves into complete chaos. I will give it credit for not romanticizing drug trips, as movies and TV tend to do, but instead only showing what it looks like from the outside, which is to say, loud and annoying. Much as I appreciate the realism, an authentic satire of grating behavior is still going to read to some viewers as grating in itself.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t note that one solution Matt comes up with for his Kool-Aid problem involves tying it to the massacre at Jonestown. However, the victims at Jonestown didn’t actually drink Kool-Aid, despite the prevalence of the offensive idiom; it was Flavor-Aid, probably not a brand anyone in the Continental hierarchy thinks is famous enough to star in its own movie franchise irrespective of its connection to mass death. I spent the whole episode waiting for someone to cite, among the many issues with Matt’s concept, that it’s based on a factual error true-crime nerds are definitely going to call him out for. I actually can’t believe there wasn’t one true-crime nerd on set to fact-check it. (Maybe they were just as scared of giving Rogen a note as Matt is to give Ron Howard a note two episodes later.)

The Studio is a very stylish, very insider-y, very funny look at an industry Quinn quite accurately says she’s come to 30 years too late. It revolves around characters doing obscenely high-paying jobs that seem to be driven by spite more than any other sentiment. It’s the most mean-spirited American sitcom I’ve seen in a minute, and while I’m saying that as a compliment, I recognize that it’s a tone others find unappealing. It also brings you its strongest statement of intent very early on: If you’re not in after “The Oner,” this show just isn’t going to be for you. But if you’ve been waiting for the heir to Veep that The Franchise, from the same creator (Armando Iannucci), somehow wasn’t: it’s here.