What to Watch Verdict
The Studio is as smart, stylish and sharp as the prestige movies that make up its world. It's one of the funniest comedy series released in the last few years, and it builds on that with endearing characters, an exciting style and an incisive look at Hollywood today.
Pros
- +
Note-perfect cast
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Smart humor
- +
Fast-paced & exciting
Cons
- -
Strange episode order
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Requires some Hollywood knowledge
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We need more!
Hollywood loves to make TV shows and movies about itself, but Apple TV Plus' new 30-minute comedy series The Studio may go down as one of the best modern Hollywood-themed series of all time. More than that, though, it's undoubtedly the best Apple TV Plus show I've seen, and easily one of my favorite from the last few years.
The Studio stars Seth Rogen as Matt Remick, a lover of prestige movies who’s promoted to head exec of the fictional Continental Pictures. He straddles the line between trying to continue releasing money-grabbing yet artistically null blockbusters, and pursuing passion projects with artistic merit, while also keeping his staff, producers and stars happy.
Joining Rogen are Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders and Kathryn Hahn as his creative executives and Catherine O’Hara as his mentor and a producer for Continental. Plus, each episode features a constantly-surprising revolving door of a-lister cameos.
Some knowledge of Hollywood is required when watching The Studio, if you want to understand every reference to "getting MGM'd" and how the movie business works. But for every dig and critique the show makes at the movie business, it finds two ways to remind us of the shared love we have of film (well, which I presume you have if you're interested in a series about the film industry!). It does a much better job of it than a similar show from 2024, The Franchise, which exhibits a total exhaustion to movies.
The real joy of the The Studio is that its comedy is both universal and incredibly witty in that "classical'" comedy way: we've got set-ups, pay-offs, reincorporation, the kind of thing you don't see much in modern comedies which define "humor" as "snippy one-liners that can be pulled for social media". Details set up early on in episodes are developed and returned in smart ways, and I was constantly being caught off-guard by where episodes would go and how topics would be resolved.
I can't recommend the show enough for fans of The Thick of It and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia due to The Studio's incredibly fast pace and barrage of jokes. The repeated use of long takes and constant drumming soundtrack adds to this, and I sometimes felt like I was watching a scene from Babylon, especially with how "cinematic" the series looks.
It's evident that The Studio is a passion project for Seth Rogen (who created the show alongside frequent collaborator Evan Goldberg as well as Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez, and also directed each episode with Goldberg), letting him reflect on his decades-long career, underlying passion for cinema and the changing whims of the industry. It's fitting, then, that he's the mightiest player in the already-strong cast, maintaining his well-known comedic persona but with several new layers of depth: Remick's conflicts touch on mental health, the search for a glorified past and the importance of self-determination. The fact that Rogen can portray this nuanced character in a buffoon who creates his own troubles, is a testament to his performance.
The rest of the cast is also wonderful, especially Ike Barinholtz as your archetypal sleazy exec Sal and Chase Sui Wonders as Remick's young protégé Quinn, and the series manages to build interesting characters from both, although Kathryn Hahn's exuberant marketing exec Maya doesn't get as much screen time as she could.
The episode order may sometimes confuse — the second episode is a bottle episode that omits most of the cast before we've even come to meet them properly, and linking plot threads between episodes are dropped after the first one and only picked back up towards the end — but the main thing that made me sad about The Studio is that there wasn't more of it!
Given its quality, though, I'd be staggered if there didn't end up being The Studio season 2. The 10 episodes of the show are a whistle-stop tour of one season of Continental's existence but there's a lot more to learn about our characters, and a lot more of Hollywood to skewer. And if Apple does invest in this series, it could quickly become a new all-time classic comedy.
The Studio streams on Apple TV Plus. More info about Apple TV Plus free trials here.
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