Apple TV+ show The Studio, with Seth Rogan, reveals the madness behind modern Hollywood

The studio head has historically been seen as a fearsome and all-powerful figure, capable of ending a career with the snap of their fingers or of changing lives with an impulsive green light. But not Seth Rogen’s studio chief in The Studio, a new Apple TV+ show that starts streaming this week. As much as Rogen’s Matt Remick, head of the fictional Continental Studios, sits in a sought-after seat of power, he is helpless against larger trends in the film industry. He wants to be making 1974 mystery film Chinatown, but instead his most important task is getting a Kool-Aid-based movie off the ground. “As pitiful as it is, the conflict that my character lives and breathes every second of his life is one a lot of people with his job are facing in real life,” Rogen says. “They love movies. They’re also responsible to a very specific bottom line and they have to defend the choice they make to a board of people who don’t give a s*** about movies.” He adds that The Studio is “very specifically written from the perspective of people that think things can work out in Hollywood”. There always is, and probably always will be, reason for optimism in Hollywood. The next big hit is perpetually just around the corner. But as audiences have become increasingly distracted by streaming, TikTok and video games, the film industry – or at least the major-studio version of it – has turned into an intellectual-property factory, hoping that franchises, superheroes and horror can sustain itself. And The Studio, with a boatload of cameos – from filmmaker Martin Scorsese to Netflix chief Ted Sarandos to actress Zoë Kravitz – taps deep into that demoralisation. Flanked by a team of executives – played by Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders – Remick finds himself beset with questions over whether they have cast a racist Kool-Aid movie, at least when he is not directly obstructing filmmakers he adores, like Scorsese and Sarah Polley. Matthew Belloni, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter magazine and founding partner of the media company Puck, appears as himself in the series. He says that there is truth underlying almost every scene in The Studio, “for better and mostly worse”. “It captures the existential dread that seems to permeate every conversation,” says Belloni. “People recognise that the glory days of Hollywood are over and the whole concept of what Hollywood even means is being redefined. And that has caused everybody in town to go completely crazy. This show captures that craziness very, very well.” The Studio is not the first time Rogen and co-creator Evan Goldberg have had a role in revealing the inner workings of a Hollywood studio. When their 2014 North Korea-set comedy The Interview led to the hacking of Sony Pictures, the studio’s private correspondence landed on the internet. “Without The Interview, a show like this would have been much harder for us to write,” Rogen says, chuckling. “We got to the CEO-level of problem.” Those problems ultimately included Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal stepping down. Pascal, who has since been a highly successful producer, has remained a mentor to Rogen and Goldberg. In The Studio, she is fictionalised by Catherine O’Hara as a savvy producer and Remick’s former boss. “One of the biggest misconceptions people seem to have with Hollywood is that it’s run by people who only care about money and don’t at all care about film,” Rogen says. “There’s a few of those people,” Goldberg chimes in. “They are out there, for sure,” continues Rogen. “But in general, the people who have ascended to Amy’s level to run studios are people who love movies and can sit in a room with the greatest filmmakers on Earth and have an on-the-level conversation about filmmaking.” Rogen and Goldberg, who created the show with Frida Perez and a pair of Veep veterans in Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory, began developing The Studio during the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, they thought it might be a satirical elegy for Hollywood. The twin blockbusters of Barbie and Oppenheimer, though, prompted them to give the series a more hopeful spin. They were never short on fodder. “Most of it is very directly from our lives,” Goldberg says. “As soon as we thought of it, we thought of a hundred episode ideas,” adds Rogen. That includes one episode where Remick joins a date at a hospital fundraiser attended by doctors. That came from Rogen’s own experience attending galas for the Alzheimer’s disease charity he runs with his wife, Lauren Miller. “I find myself at a lot of medical galas and at a lot of tables with doctors who save people’s lives. And they seem to take particular joy in diminishing what I do for a living,” Rogen says, laughing. Those scenes – the doctors are the ones who love The Bear – unfold with Remick claiming that what he does matters, even if that includes a movie that sounds not too dissimilar in vulgarity to Rogen and Goldberg’s R-rated animated comedy Sausage Party. “What’s funny about Hollywood is how people have imbued every moment with life-altering stakes that could last forever,” says Rogen. “People seem to take their jobs in Hollywood more seriously than the people who are actually making nuclear decisions. That’s what’s terrifying.” As much as it lampoons Hollywood, The Studio is also an ode to it. An episode about a missing reel is done in the style of Chinatown. Most of the series, which Rogen and Goldberg directed, is shot in long, balletic takes – even the episode in which Remick keeps fouling up an ambitious long take attempted by Polley. Those are just some of the ironies of The Studio, which, at the next fundraising gala in Los Angeles, is sure to be – more than any new movie – what most people are talking about.

Apple TV+ show The Studio, with Seth Rogan, reveals the madness behind modern Hollywood

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s new comedy show explores the craziness permeating modern Hollywood amid the industry’s current challenges