In the cutthroat world of legacy Hollywood, Seth Rogen plays Matt Remick, the fresh-faced head of crumbling Continental Studios, who’s thrown straight into the fire as he chases A-list nods while dodging boardroom sharks and franchise flops. With his ragtag exec crew, he scrambles to blend indie dreams with blockbuster bucks, all while the whole biz teeters on the edge of irrelevance.

The Studio Review

No one would fault you for not wanting to give anything that Seth Rogen is a part of a chance. The man has seemingly fully shoved his head, shoulders deep up his own rectum over the past twenty years, becoming one of the most insufferable celebrities in Hollywood—and that is saying a whole lot. The Studio in no way deserves all of the accolades that it’s getting. The lion’s share of its recent 13 Emmy-win, is almost entirely thanks to Hollywood smuggly patting itself on the back for being able to take a joke. However, The Studio is a genuinely entertaining bit of fluff.

Credit where credit is due, the first episode is stellar. It’s funny and brisk, full of larger-than-life characters masterfully played by people like Brian Cranston, who steps back into farcical comedy like Malcom in the Middle wrapped yesterday. The cinematography is viscerally integral to the storytelling without being obnoxious, and the dialogue is crisp and identifiable without the pretentiousness of many other wink-and-nod Hollywood send-ups.

After the fantastic beginning, things don’t take a dive, but the magic does dwindle rather steadily. The end result is a not-so-mundane program that delivers laughs and benefits a lot from leaning hard into episodic storytelling. So, each episode has a freshness that doesn’t necessarily require audiences to be bogged down by anything that they didn’t love from the previous offering.

I don’t know that I can bring myself to mark it as worthy of our Worth it moniker, but if you’re a fan of this site, I bet you would dig The Studio as a nice distraction.

WOKE REPORT

Jupiter to Get Stupider

• Every primary character is a mess of one sort or another (eccentric, self-absorbed, grotesquely ambitious, etc.), but the men are also all doofuses, weak-willed, or both.

Lights, Camera, Lesbians

•  It can be tricky to sift through The Studio’s themes and distinguish between the Leftist sacraments being normalized and those being lampooned.
  •  The first faux film we see in production is a 1950s drama about two lesbians. Early on, it’s made clear that Seth Rogen’s character aspires to create “artistic” films rather than big-budget spectacles. With that in mind, my impression of The Studio’s treatment of The Silver Lake (the fictional film’s title) is that Rogen and the creative team are acknowledging what Hollywood defines as art. They’re not really mocking it, but neither are they endorsing it. The stance feels more neutral.

DEIaaaaammmn!!!

• The Studio isn’t afraid to mock Hollywood’s preoccupation with race and DEI casting.
  • In fact, one of the funniest episodes of the season is spent with the core cast obsessing over getting the “right mix” for their summer tentpole film, and even pokes fun at their personal oversensitivity to race.
    • However, only the white executives have a problem with it. The ambiguously-Asian female/smug junior exec laughs at the white people stressing over it.
      • It’s not that I don’t think white Hollywood execs don’t behave this way, it’s just that I doubt that Hollywood execs with more melanin are any better.
    • They even manage to take aim at Hollywood’s specifically not wanting to cast white people.

Give Them A Miner Helmet

• One thing that isn’t ambiguous is how far up Greta Gerwig’s rectum the writers are. While they have a little fun at Hollywood’s fixation on female directors, they clearly adore Gerwig.
  • If you’re not sure why adoring Gerwig is woke, it’s because she is a way-overhyped (because she is a woman) uber-nightmare feminist who no one would have ever heard of if she were a man.
    • Also, Barbie was terrible.

Support Women

• As I said above, they gently poke at Hollywood’s “support” of female directors, but they clearly don’t understand what’s actually funny about it. The show’s perspective is that the joke is that white men want to support them, but due to their white maleness, they couldn’t possibly understand what it takes to do so, and certainly could never grasp the why of it all.
  • They don’t come anywhere close to acknowledging that the whole movement is self-defeating BS that artificially lifts up many women beyond their artistic or box office value.
    • The Acolyte
    • The Marvels
    • Blink Twice
    • Etc.

I DECLARE BANKRUPTCYYYYYYY

• Seth Rogen’s character is very much cut from the same cloth as The Office’s (US) Michael Scott. He’s desperate for approval from others and generally well-meaning and nice. Though, of course, Rogen is nowhere near the comedic actor that Steve Carell is.
  • It would be easy to classify his character as a woke caricature of a man, but I don’t get the sense that there’s any malice or sanctimony written into the character’s subtext and that he’s instead simply based on an archetype.

Why Isn’t It Higher?

• Another reason for the low Woke rating is that they really do tackle a lot of Leftist tropes all season long, while never really blasting middle America, conservatism, etc.
  • No one was more surprised than I.