The Studio review: Seth Rogen leads a manically funny Hollywood satire

Content warning: suicide mention in this review of The Studio.

Little did they know, in the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, that the mighty studio system – oft-mighty abusive to the likes of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Hattie McDaniel, Anna May Wong and later Rock Hudson – would be brought low by ket-sniffing tech bros and the endlessly proliferating tendrils of the streaming hydra.

But here we are. The overlords of the old guard are reduced to rubbing shoulders with or, grovelling genuflection to, the new money of a medium they once sneered at: television. Which makes it all the more Machiavellian when conquerors like Apple TV satirically swipe at the machine they helped dismantle.

Let’s be clear: there have long been scabrous take-downs of Hollywood. Preston Sturges lightly ribbed the indie/mainstream divide by borrowing Jonathan Swift’s already-satire for his 1941 comedy Sullivan’s Travels.

Watch The Studio trailer.

Gloria Swanson broke the mould as a faded star begrudging the death of the silent era at the hands of the talkies in Billy Wilder’s 1951 tragedy Sunset Boulevard. One year later, the eternal sunshine of Gene Kelly and Stanley Dolan’s Singin’ in the Rain offered a lighter-hearted refrain.

Later, John Schlesinger unleashed a Lynchian nightmare in 1975’s The Day of the Locust before David Lynch did similar with 2001’s Mulholland Drive.

The Adrian Grenier-led Entourage is a key player regarding the small screen dive-bombing into the celluloid silver lake. A goofy look at a would-be star and has liability mates attempting to get a leg up on LA’s number one industry, the 2004 debuting show is loosely based on a watered-down version of Mark Wahlberg’s way wilder misbehaviour.

Initially broadcast on cable channel HBO, it will presumably be in the mix when Max belatedly starts streaming in Australia at the end of March 2025, thereby denuding former 20^th Century Fox owner Murdoch’s Binge.

More recently, Armando Iannucci of The Thick of It and Veep fame turned his satirical ire on the Marvel machine in the absolutely marvellous and brutally cancelled superhero movie-skewering The Franchise. Now, we have a new champion in The Studio.

The Studio: Kool-Aid

Set in the here and now, it’s created by Seth Rogen and his This Is the End co-director Evan Goldberg, plus Frida Perez and Veep alums Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck. Rogen, an eminently likeable screen presence, plays Matt, a top dog exec in one of the few remaining legacy houses, the fictional Continental Studios, while the new beasts are barking at their door.

Only, he sells out within the first five minutes when his big boss, an irascibly grand Bryan Cranston’s suitably mythological monster-named Griffin Mill, offers him a diabolical deal. Griffin has just knifed Matt’s beloved mentor and now former studio boss Patty (Schitt’s Creek’s mighty scene-chewer Catherine O’Hara) and will crown an undeniably power-lusty Matt on one condition.

He must make a movie about the Kool-Aid Man, mascot of the all-pervasive American soft drink. As Griffin puts it, ‘If Warner Brothers can make one billion off the plastic tits of a pussy-less doll, we should be able to make two’.

So Matt gets to be king of the Golden Age castle, but only if he makes Griffin an explicitly dumb movie for the corporate gods. That this fictional Faustian pact is served on a streamer, Apple TV, the supposed enemy of Matt’s rose-tinted glasses view of the film industry, makes it all the more delicious.

Also featuring Ike Barinholtz as Sal, the dudebro exec and bestie he hop-skips over into the top gig, Agatha All Along star Kathryn Hahn as a fashion label-overloading marketing guru Maya and Bodies Bodies Bodies breakout Chase Sui Wonders as a newly elevated but still long-run exec, The Studio is a heady brew.

There’s certainly no lack of ambition in a show with so much budget it can drop a Rolling Stones song as a callback joke.

Matt, a dreamer who wants to ‘make the next Rosemary’s Baby or Annie Hall or a movie not made by a pervert’ thinks he can marry his artistic ideals with business deals by tapping his mate Martin freaking Scorsese in episode one of ten.

But when the adored auteur wants to make his movie about the Jonestown massacre, the unfortunate link to Kool-Aid in that heinous cult murder-suicide history places Matt in an impossible situation. And in the bad books of both his lifelong hero and Charlize Theron.

The Studio: going for gold

Entourage always soared on the strength of casting real-life celebrates as hyper-exaggerated caricatures of themselves, a feat perfected by the Netflix-adopted French series Call My Agent! AKA Dix pour cent. The Studio wants in on that action.

But The Studio only gets better when it flexes its filmic muscles over simply the strong arm of its casting. The second episode, featuring Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley shooting a lesbian noir with Past Lives star Greta Lee, meta-textually features an over-eager Matt messing up an in-universe magic hour-staged one-take shot while the actual episode we’re watching is done in one.  

If you think that’s fun, wait until you see Olivia Wilde embrace her real-world infamy, following the behind-the-scenes mess of the unfairly maligned sci-fi film Don’t Worry Darling. Putting in an increasingly unhinged turn as herself as a frazzled noir film director (it’s a running theme) while her star, Zak Efron, bemoans hating her is a flex.

I half expected Florence Pugh to show up to stick the knife in. Where it ends is pure bedlam.

Perhaps in a prophetic move, The Studio reaches its zenith with an episode set at the Golden Globes as presented by Ramy Youssef. Stacked with celebrity cameos, including Severance star Adam Scott and Hacks lead Jean Smart, even Netflix boss Ted Sarandos shows up (though there’s no sign of Apple Studios’ Zack Van Amburg or Jamie Erlicht).

Blink Twice director Zoë Kravitz of Big Little Lies fame relishes dropping the mask as a version of herself determined to win a statuette at all costs. Supplicating herself at the altar of a Hollywood foreign press voting cabal she readily calls freaks, she mirrors Matt’s empty bargaining even as she crushes his ego by holding out on whether she’ll thank the studio boss in her speech – something his mum has insisted must happen, or none of it is worth anything at all.

Then Kravitz doubles down off-chops on mushroom-overdosed chocolates in the wild, two-part, Vegas-set finale in which Dave Franco and cheese nachos somehow manage to upstage her.

If The Studio isn’t quite as sharp as The Franchise nor as adorkable as Entourage in its opening beats, stick with it. By the final shot of the Rogen and Goldberg-directed season, I was all in, even if O’Hara is criminally left on the bench too often (please sort that out by next season, folks).

It appears there’s life left in the self-cannibalising studio system yet.

The Studio premieres on Apple TV+ on 26 March 2025.

Discover film & TV reviews on ScreenHub …