Josh Reviews The Studio

I am madly in love with The Studio, the latest collaboration between Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.  The show is a masterpiece.  I was riveted by every minute of the ten episodes in this first season.  If you haven’t seen The Studio, go watch it right now!!  This is going to be hard to beat for number one when I make my list in December of my favorite TV shows of 2025…

Seth Rogen stars as Matt Remick, a movie studio executive who, in the series premiere, is thrust into the role of head of Continental Studios when his mentor and the former studio head, Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara), is ousted by the wealthy CEO of Continental, Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston).  Matt loves movies and has dreamed all his life of running a studio.  This is his dream job.  Unfortunately, Matt quickly discovers that his dream job is pretty awful and stressful.  As Matt desperately tries to find some way to make movies that are good while also keeping the talent happy and making sure the movies make money so as to keep his boss Griffin happy, he careens from one crisis to the next, alongside his good buddy Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), Continental’s head of marketing Maya Mason (Kathryn Hahn), and Matt’s former assistant Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders), who Matt promoted to junior executive when he took the studio head job.  The Studio was created by Mr. Rogen and Mr. Goldberg, along with Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez.  Mr. Rogen and Mr. Goldberg co-directed all ten episodes, and also wrote several of them.

This show is spectacular!  It is tremendously funny and also nail-bitingly tense.  This is a potent combination.  Mr. Rogen & Mr. Goldberg have managed to find a way to thrust the audience right into the thick of the crisis-a-second life of Matt and his friends & colleagues, so that the experience of watching this show is edge-of-your seat suspenseful.  The show is filmed in a series of “oners”, long, unbroken camera shots.  (Most of these episodes are designed to feel as if the entire episode is one long “oner”, with any edits very carefully camouflaged.)  Additionally, there are only “A” stories in these episodes; we never cut away to follow subplots or other storylines with other characters.  This means that we the viewers are right there with Matt at every moment, with no breaks and no escapes, allowing the tension and stress in each episode to build and build and build.  This is an extraordinarily clever approach!!

These episodes are masterfully staged and directed.  I am bowled over by the care and precision it must have taken to create these unbroken oners, many of which feature multiple locations, scores (if not hundreds!) of extras, characters getting in and out of vehicles (oh my gosh, the crazy drive that Mr. Rogen does at the start of the second episode had me bowled over at the audacity of how they managed to do that in a oner)… it’s extraordinary!  I was staggered by the production challenge these shots must have represented.  (Mr. Rogen has talked in interviews about growing up in the Judd Apatow school of comedy filmmaking, in which capturing the joke was the most important thing, and the visual style was secondary.  I love Judd Apatow, and I think he’s a very talented filmmaker.  But it’s fascinating to see how Mr. Rogen & Mr. Goldberg took basically the opposite approach here, devoting so much care and attention to the creation of each individual shot, while at the same time also holding onto the comedy!!  This is an incredible achievement.)

The tension in each episode is assisted by the wonderful jazzy score by Antonio Sánchez, who utilizes a similar approach to his masterful score for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s wonderful 2014 film Birdman.  (Watching The Studio, I was struck by how strongly the score resembled the approach taken by the score of Birdman; I laughed when I looked up the show’s composer and discovered it was made by the same guy!)  The score never settles into a comfortable rhythm; instead, its propulsive beats effectively ratchet up the feelings of stress and uncertainty.  This is very skillfully executed.

I’ve been a fan of Seth Rogen’s ever since Paul Feig & Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, and I have followed him to pretty much everything he’s done since then.  I’ve always enjoyed his work, but this show is one of the best matches I’ve ever seen between Mr. Rogen’s specific style and approach with the character he’s playing.  He is so, so funny as Matt.  He brings enough charm and inherent likability to the character that we’re rooting for Matt, even while Mr. Rogen and the show continue to show Matt’s being a dunderhead and, often, the butt of the joke.  Mr. Rogen has off-the-charts comedic chemistry with Ike Barinholtz, who is this show’s secret weapon.  I have always enjoyed Mr. Barinholtz’s work, and I’ve always thought he was funny, but wow, I’ve never been so in love with a character or performance of his anywhere close to how much I love his Sal Saperstein.  Mr. Barinholtz has often played characters with a dark or maniacal bent, which felt like it’d be a perfect fit for this show about selfish Hollywood types.  And it is, but I was surprised how gentle and lovable Mr. Barinholtz made Sal.  This pays off in spades, as Sal is easily my favorite character on the show.  (Episode eight, “The Golden Globes”, depicts all of Hollywood learning Sal Saperstein’s name, and it is truly joyous.)

I’ve loved Kathryn Hahn for years, and it’s so great to see how she really seems to be killing it recently.  She was magnificent in Agatha All Along, and she is amazing every second she’s on screen here as Continental’s marketing guru Maya.  Maya thinks she knows better than the other executives (and often she seems to), but she’s just as desperate to be cool and successful as Matt and the others are.  Ms. Hahn makes this mix of confidence and desperation tremendously funny.  Then there is the great Catherine O’Hara, who is absolutely note-perfect as Patty.  At the start of the season, Patty is a mess; she’s been fired in disgrace from her top-dog perch atop Hollywood.  I thought the show was positioning Patty to be an enemy for Matt (her former protege who has now taken her job); but I loved that, instead, they kept Patty in Matt’s orbit.  She’s sometimes helpful, but also she’s as out for herself as everyone else is in the business.  Ms. O’Hara is hilarious playing broken and also playing master of her domain; it’s great fun getting to watch her to do both over the course of the season!

Chase Sui Wonders is wonderful as Quinn.  She starts out the season as more of an innocent than the rest of the gang, which is a fun note to have in the mix.  It’s also great to see her throw some elbows and act selfishly as the season progresses, particularly in episode five, “The War”, when Quinn and Sal find themselves in a knock-down battle between competing projects they’re each championing.  The great Bryan Cranston pops up a number of times during the season as the wealthy and weird Continental CEO Griffin Mill.  (That’s the name of the character Tim Robbins plays in Robert Altman’s wonderful Hollywood satire The Player.  Mr, Cranston seems to be playing a very different character, though it’s a funny in-joke to imagine that this is how Tim Robbins’ character might have wound up a few decades later.)  Mr. Cranston is able to be menacing and funny; a great combination.  David Krumholtz pops up a few times — and steals the show every time — as a take-no-prisoners talent agent.

The show is jam-packed with guest stars.  Mr. Rogen and Mr. Goldberg went to great lengths to set this show within a “real” version of Hollywood, which is a very cool approach.  Continental Studios is made up, but otherwise, this show is filled with references to real studios and real movies, and Matt’s world is filled with real Hollywood stars.  It’s tremendous fun to see people like Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Charlize Theron, Anthony Mackie, Sarah Polley, Ice Cube, Adam Scott, Zac Efron, and so many more familiar faces pop up.  Dave Franco is amazing as a coked-out version of himself in the season-ending two-parter (even giving a hilarious narration to the “previously on…” opening of episode ten!!); director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors) is tremendously game for playing a loser/hack version of himself; and Zoë Kravitz is amazing in episode eight, only to return for episodes nine and ten and be even funnier!!

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like this show.  I liked it right from the opening of the first episode, and by the end of the brilliant second episode, I had fallen deeply in love.  (Episode two is “The Oner”, a gloriously meta story in which Matt makes a mess of a set-visit to a film crew trying to achieve a difficult oner shot, set at magic hour — which means that the episode itself was ALSO a show that was somehow filmed in a single take at magic hour, meaning they only had like a 45-minute window per day to accomplish it.  Amazing.)  In an age of long movies and long episodes of TV shows, The Studio wisely keeps each episode brisk, not usually longer than thirty minutes.  That’s yet another reason why I love this show.

I am thrilled that The Studio has been renewed for a second season.  I can’t wait for more, though this near-perfect first season is going to be hard to top.