It's a big week for those who savor Apple TV+ productions like a bag of pesto-mozzarella chips. No sooner had Severance season 2 concluded, leaving fans speechless, than the streaming platform has released a new series to binge-watch without restraint. At the helm of The Studio are Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, two names who have both set foot on the screen with comedies like Superbad and have dynamited genres by producing shows like Preacher, The Boys and Invincible. Two adolescent movie fans whose talent has continued to mature, resulting in one of the best shows of the year.
Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) is an executive at Continental, a film studio whose director (Catherine O’Hara) has just been fired by CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston). Remick sees this as an opportunity to take control of the studio and finally produce real works of the seventh art. Principles that faded as soon as Mill offered him the position, on the condition that he show that he could put Continental's financial interests before everything else, notably by producing a franchise around the Kool-Aid drink. At the helm of operations, will he be able to reconcile the need for profitability and artistic desire?
Hollywood whining game
Hollywood likes to look at its navel with works that reek of nostalgia for the industry's roaring twenties, such as La La Land, Babylon, Once Upon a Time.... to name just the latest batch. Films that look to the past to express a pessimistic version of the present and future of the medium. It must be said that, today, it is easier to shoot the ambulance by openly producing satires aimed at mocking these flaws without pushing the reflection further. The Franchise, the HBO / Max series canceled after one season, was a good example of this, relishfully attacking Marvel, but limiting itself to just that. Would we really have wanted a season 2? To say what more?
The Studio shares these same ideas by drawing a rather unflattering behind-the-scenes look at these productions where good intentions disappear depending on the number of zeros on a check and where the ego war rages. As Catherine O’Hara’s character so aptly sums up, there are so many competing interests in the process that it’s already a miracle if the film gets made, let alone a good one…
Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Alex Gregory, Frida Perez, and Peter Huyck’s Baby is a furiously funny portrait of the entire process. Casting phase, discussions with exhibitors, marketing, choosing the director… each episode will focus on a particular moment in the creation and all the mess that can result when an executive prioritizes what the talent thinks of him, a director goes in search of the perfect shot, or the filmmaker is given control of the final cut. Whether you work in the industry or not, The Studio never suggests that these situations are entirely fictional and you can feel the experience within the profession of its authors, with the appropriate dose of exaggeration.
Series for film buffs
Cynical yes, corrosive at times, nevertheless, the series is never gratuitously mean. On the contrary, we feel that if Rogen and Goldberg had their greatest successes on the small screen, there is a deep respect for the cinema and they are above all children of cinema. Remick is a sort of anti-hero raised on film who has no other passion and who takes too much care to defend his artists, often against everyone's interest, including their own. His colleague and friend Sal (Ike Barinholtz), the young and ambitious Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders) or the marketing head Maya obsessed with the new generation (brilliant Kathryn Hahn), all the protagonists are devoted to their work. The Studio shines a light on the decision-makers, the doers and all the "little hands" who surround them. A series that shouts that the blockbuster can also be an art and that cinema is made up of people who fight for it to continue to exist.
The term is overused, but The Studio is indeed a "declaration of love" to cinema. This obviously involves a shower of delightful cameos where directors and actors come to play their own roles with just the right amount of parodic spirit, in order to perfectly correspond to the image that we would have of them. Especially since some are even entitled to real narrative arcs.
In hindsight, this is perhaps the only objective flaw that we could reproach The Studio for, that of a certain introspection that will have more difficulty reaching an audience that lacks references. Certainly, the show remains funny and amusing due to the grotesqueness of its characters and the catastrophic sequence of situations, nevertheless, it assumes to address itself mainly to moviegoers.
The showiest show of all shows
Rogen and Goldberg take charge of almost the entire production of the series while choosing to make as few cuts as possible. Initially disconcerting, the staging quickly finds its interest in the energy it provokes, conveying well the frenzy that surrounds the premises of a production studio where everyone is running around and where no one takes the time to listen to each other. It's not an office, it's a ring. Which doesn't prevent having fun behind the camera by playing the mise en abyme, as when episode 2 revolves around a single shot and is itself directed entirely in single shots. Or the episode on the set of a film "à la Chinatown" which turns into a film noir.
And the comedy series may cry "cinema is dead, long live cinema", it never forgets what it is, a series. The Studio respects its medium by reconnecting with the spirit of shows with a discreet central theme whose thirty-minute episodes can almost be watched out of order. We are faced with a production that knows what it is doing from A to Z and does it well. Where the number of episodes and their duration have been subjects of debate on many recent shows, this first season almost feels like too few because we enjoyed watching it so much.
In short, 2, Adolescence and now The Studio… In this first quarter of 2025, creators have taken matters into their own hands on streaming platforms by offering us series that remind us how big, important, entertaining, and memorable they can be.
0 Comments