The Studio S1E1: The Promotion

Hollywood loves telling stories about Hollywood. And as insidery and self-indulgent as those stories can be, we also love watching them. Getting a glimpse behind the curtain to see how movie magic is made is irresistible. So Seth Rogen and longtime writing partner Evan Goldberg do just that, taking the Veep/Silicon Valley model of people getting to do a very cool thing and screwing it up badly every week, and applying it to the world of moviemaking. Not to mention Apple TV’s rarely-miss formula of high-concept shows built around a few big-name actors.

The show is put into motion when breezy, mercurial studio head Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) names Matt Remick (Rogen) the new head of Continental pictures, having just fired Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara), Rogen’s mentor. Matt is a dyed-in-the-wool movie nerd, who wants the studio to make good movies first, and money second. But he also wants to suck up to his boss, who wants to make money first, second, and third, and good movies never comes into it.

In fact, Matt’s first assignment is to build a billion-dollar franchise around Mill’s latest synergy deal: Kool-Aid. He’s convinced a Kool-Aid Man movie could be as big as Barbie, because he understands nothing about storytelling or character, only brand recognition. Matt does know about those things, and has to set them aside to try and make a billion-dollar movie about a giant glass pitcher who busts through a wall and says “Oh Yeah!” and has literally no other characteristics.

So one hour into his dream job, and Matt has already compromised his integrity. His whole life is now a constant stream of hugely consequential snap decisions, made while several people are yelling at him, which very quickly backfire. Not to belabor the Veep/Silicon Valley comparison, but viewers of those shows will be well familiar with a team coming up with what seems like a very good idea, only to have the rug pulled out from under them, leaving them to replace the good idea with a series of worse and worse ones.

We cycle through that arc several times, as Matt makes increasingly poor decisions in a frantic effort to appease both art and commerce. His main trouble is that he refuses to stake out any middle ground between the two. He hires Martin Scorcese to make a big-budget drama about Jonestown (an infamous cult that committed mass suicide by drinking Kool-Aid), and also hires the director of Captain Underpants to make a cutesy kids’ movie where the anthropomorphic juice pitcher has a daughter who has to learn to believe in herself.

Of course Matt’s attempt to make everyone happy makes no one happy, least of all himself. And yet, the show gives us something we rarely got from Veep and Silicon Valley — a moment of grace. After screaming at him for taking her job, Matt and Patty have a warm conversation (which you may remember from the trailer.) She sympathizes with his plight because she was in it for fifteen years. It’s hell, being responsible for every bad thing that happens, catering to the conflicting desires of rich and powerful idiots, and yet, “when it all comes together, and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.” (There’s no need to talk about how good O’Hara is in the scene; she’s great in everything.)

So Matt will continue to screw up and stress out for as long as The Studio runs, but as long as he finds those occasional moments of grace, it’ll all be worth it. Mostly.

Quick cuts:
• The whole episode is a series of long tracking shots, following Matt walking around, getting into his car, driving across town, etc. It’s a self-consciously show-offy thing movie nerds love to do, but it works really well. It gives the episode a brisk pace and an immediately. We’re right there with Matt, in the middle of the frantic mess.

• Rounding out the core cast is Ike Barinholtz (The Mindy Project) as Matt’s coked-up bro best friend and fellow studio exec, and Chase Sui Wonders (Bodies Bodies Bodies) as Matt’s enthusiastic assistant. Neither of them get a ton to do this week, but there’s a lot of table-setting.

• One thing Sal does get to do is point out that one reason Barbie was a hit is that she’s attractive, and “no one wants to fuck the Kool-Aid Man,” which leads to a digression about how, anatomically, one would even go about that.

• Because everyone in Hollywood loves telling stories about Hollywood, the season of The Studio is loaded down with as-themselves cameos. Martin Scorsese shows up to talk about the Jonestown movie, and is terrific as an actor, quickly seeing through and tearing down Matt’s bullshit. Charlize Theron shows up to deliver one killer line, and Steve Buscemi gets one terrific scene.

• Apple TV released the first two episodes together; we’ll review the second one as soon as we have time and then proceed on a weekly schedule.