In the new showbiz comedy The Studio, Bryan Cranston has a recurring role as Griffin Mill, the craven movie executive played by Tim Robbins in the 1992 film The Player. It’s not the only homage that The Studio, co-created by and starring Seth Rogen, pays to Robert Altman’s classic movie satire. Every episode features at least one extended shot presented as a Player-esque single shot, a.k.a. a “oner” — the second episode, called “The Oner,” is just that. But the oners are usually presented in self-aware fashion, with Ike Barinholtz’s executive Sal complaining to new studio boss Matt (played by Rogen), “Oners are so stupid. It’s just the director jacking off while making everyone else’s lives miserable. Audiences do not care about this shit.”
The target audience for The Studio probably will, though, because the series is loaded with inside-baseball references, from stars (Zoë Kravitz, Adam Scott) and directors (Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard) playing themselves to episodes built as elaborate pastiches to old movies like Chinatown. At its best, it is simultaneously vicious and affectionate, showing both a far greater command of its subject than HBO’s limp and superficial Hollywood satire The Franchise and a deeper level of fondness for it. This is a show made by people who clearly love Hollywood, and who as a result understand exactly how to craft jokes about all the ways the town, and its business, are terrible.
Matt is a movie nerd who has turned his only interest into his career, and who gets caught between desperation to hold onto his job in a rapidly-shifting industry and a gnawing suspicion that everything he does keeps making the medium he loves worse. There’s a running thread through the season about Griffin forcing Matt to make a movie about the Kool-Aid Man, which goes about as well as you might expect. And most of the other films being pitched by Sal and by Matt’s former assistant Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders) sound nearly as bad.
“The Oner” is an excellent example of many of the things the series — created by Rogen, Evan Goldberg (who co-directs every episode with Rogen), Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez — does well. As director Sarah Polley(*) attempts to conclude her latest film not only with a oner, but one filmed at the golden hour right before sunset, Matt finds himself continually getting in the way, through a mixture of slapstick, neuroses, and oblivious Hollywood egotism. It’s a stunt about a stunt, and one that mocks the self-importance of the device while also showing how effective it can be(**). And it’s an excellent use of Rogen’s gift for simultaneously playing insufferable and endearing.
(*) As directors, Rogen and Goldberg are generally good with actors, but they’re especially good in this show when working either with directors who act a good amount, like Scorsese, or directors who used to be actors. Polley, who hasn’t acted onscreen in 15 years, is incredibly funny in playing her fictionalized self’s struggle to conceal her disdain for Matt. Olivia Wilde is terrific in the Chinatown spoof, and Howard’s comic timing remains so sharp, it once again makes me wish he would occasionally take an acting job where he isn’t playing himself. (He’s only done that a couple of times in the 40 years since Happy Days ended, most recently in a Skype cameo on an episode of the Matthew Perry-Thomas Lennon Odd Couple remake in 2016.) A later episode features another actor turned director, Rebecca Hall — not playing herself, but playing Matt’s new girlfriend, a pediatric oncologist. As someone who still acts in between filmmaking gigs, Hall is probably more famous than Polley, so it’s odd to cast her as a civilian character.
(**) Though even “The Oner” is upstaged a bit by debuting a few weeks after Netflix’s brilliant all-oner miniseries Adolescence.
Rogen and Barinholtz are in every episode, while the loaded supporting cast comes and goes based on the needs of the plot (and, perhaps, the other actors’ schedules). As Patty, Matt’s ousted predecessor, Catherine O’Hara is the most understated she’s been in forever (maybe going back to A Mighty Wind), adding just enough gravity to the proceedings to keep the farce from feeling too strained. Kathryn Hahn rolls in periodically as Maya, the studio’s head of marketing, dressed in fashions designed to make her look at least 20 years younger, to angrily curse out everyone within sight, and is of course brilliant at this.
The Studio tends to be at its funniest when it’s presenting things through a cinematic lens. Episodes where the business isn’t as central to the plot are less successful than ones that couldn’t take place in any other setting, like an outing where Matt begins to fear that casting Ice Cube as Kool-Aid Man is racist. Like the movie business itself, it’s hit-or-miss. But when it hits — like a season-ending two-parter that serves as a reminder of what an astonishingly good, and game, comic performer Cranston was in his pre-Walter White days — it’s a hilarious reminder of what can happen in that ridiculous town when enough talented people are all working in unison at the top of their game.
The first two episodes of The Studio begin streaming March 26 on Apple TV+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all 10 episodes.
From Rolling Stone US
