Now while The Studio seems to have been fully embraced as a work of genius in the States, it still feels like an unknown over here. Perhaps because its on Apple TV, which is the streaming equivalent of having to cross the Thames for a night out; psychologically at least, it’s just too far to bother with.
Yet, once you do, you find a show which is not simply a laugh-a-second comedy but a satire which manages to flay the modern Hollywood, and even expose a great American rot.
Going behind-the-scenes in Tinseltown is no new thing, classic films like The Player and Get Shorty and Singin’ in the Rain have mined our fascination around movie-making, with troublesome stars, spoilt decadence and clueless execs. But The Studio manages to bring things right up to date by taking the usual depictions of this shallow world and, well, making them even more shallow.
The series follows studio head Matt Remick, played by Seth Rogen, who has just taken over Continental Studios, a somewhat third tier studio churning out audience-chasing fodder; Remick though, is on the side of the creatives, and wants to make movie art. Except, he doesn’t really. He’s all too aware that his big bosses want to make big cash based around IP’s like Kool Aid, and is personally guided by a compulsion towards making friends with famous stars rather than guiding them to make great films. Rogen’s Remnick is a tasteless man-child, a blundering goof with an ego that is only tempered by his subservience to celebrity; very much a man of our era.
The cast around Rogen are hilarious – particularly Catherine O’Hara as Patty Leigh, the previous studio head, and newly Emmy-nominated Ike Barinholtz as his principal sidekick Sal Saperstein – and the cameos from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Dave Franco are exceptional, topped off by Bryan Cranston as Continental Studios’ CEO Griffin Mill which may be his funniest performance ever, which is really saying something.
But the genius of The Studio is that it isn’t purely a lampooning lark, it is a satisfying work of art in its own right; something the new Superman film should have tried to keep in mind.
Has there been a more satisfying series than this in terms of sheer production chutzpa? This is a show that recreated the entire Golden Globes ceremony for one episode. And one which uses extreme long takes, across every episode, to give it a dizzying whirl which satisfyingly serves the comedy, which recalls how Fawlty Towers kept scenes purposely long to allow John Cleese to build up a head of steam.
In The Studio, the long takes deliciously show how rumours can rise and fall, how a situation – a shoot, an important meeting – can spiral out of control, and, as the camera follows Remnick and his cohorts through conference rooms and studio lots and parties, how creative ideas can be shifted and compromised and turned into pure junk. Here, the ‘group grope’ method of creativity is shown in full effect, where ideas are twisted by many hands; not just writers and directors but execs, assistants, accountants, owners, brand representatives, in a modern world where everyone is a ‘Creative’.
And most of all Remick, who wants to be a radical studio head renegade – we are in the age of the corporate ‘rebel’, where even the most conservative of clueless bean-pushers will call themselves ‘disruptors’ – but simply isn’t. He’s a star fucker. And his humiliations come plentifully, and often.
In episode two, The Oner, we see him visit a set on the final day of production. He’s concerned about being seen as a studio Suit and wants to instead show he’s a cool guy there to help… which of course ends with him completely ruining the complex shot they’re in the middle of – the ‘oner’, the one take marvel – by stumbling into shots, getting picked up on mics, and then falling fully over in one of a series of world-class pratfalls which Rogen delivers throughout the series.
And the best thing about the episode: it too, is all done in one-take.
Now, Adolescence deserves all the praise that has been heaped on it – fully deserving its 13 nominations to The Studio’s 23 (Owen Cooper will surely become the youngest ever Emmy winner on the night) - but in terms of its much heralded one-take accomplishments, The Studio matches it. On its own terms of course: while Adolescence showed in real-time how lives can quickly fall apart in the most serious way possible, The Studio shows how egos can be ripped apart in the funniest way possible.
While not every episode of The Studio is one-take, each one makes use of very extended takes, which peaks in episode 9, CinemaCon, probably the single funniest episode of any show this decade. It features the gang turning up to the important fan conference to present their slate, only for Remick to hold a party in his suite the night before, and in typical fashion try be cool by laying on “an old-school Hollywood buffet,” meaning drugs in the form of magic mushroom chocolate bars. The problem being that he misinterpreted the dosage of the mushrooms, and the chocolate is super-strong, which he doesn’t realise until Franco and Zoe Kravitz start tripping wildly; but not as wildly as Cranston’s Griffin Mill. Cue an all-timer of a sequence in which Mill goes on the rampage around the hotel with the team trying to find where he is before the press get wind of it, and having to ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ the man out of the situation.
Anyway, you simply have to make the journey to Apple TV to watch it.
The Bear caused controversy last year by featuring in the Emmy’s comedy categories rather than the drama categories, and again features heavily in comedy… well, as that show drifts ever further into being the most boring show on TV, surely The Studio’s time is now.
