I think the statute of
limitations has passed when it comes to mourning the cancellation of Freaks
& Geeks, regularly considered one of the greatest three network shows
unfairly cancelled after just one season. (The other two are My So-Called
Life and Firefly, though I've always felt Now & Again should
be on the list.) Besides I think we can see things have worked out pretty well
for just about everybody connected with the show and that's just when you
consider their subsequent TV careers.
We've watched Linda Cardellini
deliver a shock to the final half of ER and deliver Emmy nominated
performances in Mad Men and Dead To Me. Jason Segel dominated
comedy as Marshall on How I Met Your Mother and has received his second
Emmy nomination for Shrinking. Busy Phipps has been one of the more
brilliant supporting actresses, perhaps best shown in Cougar Town. And
for all the controversy surrounding him now James Franco's work in The Deuce
was one of the most brilliant double acts I've seen in TV all these years.
And in the last few years Seth
Rogen has slowly been moving away from cinema to TV. He received an Emmy
nomination for his work in Pam & Tommy in 2022. He is currently
co-starring and writing the Apple TV series Platonic with Rose Byrne,
recently airing its second season. And earlier this year he did the full auteur
bit, writing, directing, producing and starring in The Studio the kind
of thing that would be considered impressive in TV five years but considering
that Quinta Brunson has been nominated as a hyphenate three straight years for Abbott
Elementary, Ayo Edebiri was nominated for directing as well as starring in The
Bear, and Rogen's former co-star Segel is nominated for acting and
producing Shrinking almost seems to make the average critic utter a
collective: "So what else is new?"
This may seem like a tame
introduction to what has been the most nominated comedy by the Emmys this past
year and that has already done superbly in quite a few of the awards shows such
as the Astras and the Gotham TV awards. But the great comedies of this era –
and no one pretends that we don't have a lot of extraordinary comedies airing
on cable, streaming and even broadcast TV – have been known for having their
creators in front of the screen as well as behind it. This is as true for last
year's winner Hacks, where Paul W. Downs co-stars, writes and produces
and is married to the showrunner as it is for the other shows I've mentioned
and I could just as easily as Somebody Somewhere which has Bridget
Everett nominated for writing during the final season. We have been blessed
that every year over the decade, a new masterpiece of a comedy seems to be
coming out.
So I didn't doubt the abilities
of the extraordinary cast that Rogen has assembled, which include such pillars
of genius as Ike Barinholtz, Catherine O'Hara, Kathryn Hahn and basically every
major director in Hollywood along with quite a few legendary actors. What I did
worry about was the tone. As I've commented over the last few years during
this decade ever since Ted Lasso debuted, comedies have generally moved
away from being nasty and laughing at the humiliations of everyone involved to
being about building relationships and laughing with them as much as at them.
This is true of all the series I've mentioned above (with the notable exception
of The Bear) as well as Only Murders in the Building, What We Do In
the Shadows and newcomers St. Denis Medical and Nobody Wants
This.
And the fact is when it comes to
making fun of themselves even the best shows about the industry can be really
mean. I speak of Showtime's Episodes and Barry where the cruelty
and bitterness of Hollywood frequently made the actions of the Chechnyan mob
look like child's play. Those shows at least had the benefit of being
well-written; I deeply feared that the tone Rogen would take to be reminiscent
of the recently departed The Franchise which tried to be Veep for
comic book movies and instead what just unfunny. Perhaps that's why it took me
until this week to finally watch the first three episodes.
It took a bit of time – maybe
twenty minutes into episode one – to finally commit and fall in love with
Rogen's vision for the show. Rogen plays Matt Remick, an executive who has been
laboring in the trenches for twenty years and is finally named the head of
Continental Studios after his mentor Patty (O'Hara) is forced out. He accepts
the job from the studio president Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston returning to his
comedy roots) who says his first job is to make a movie about Kool-Aid. This
goes against all the principles Matt has ever had about what he thought movies
should be. So naturally he immediately agrees to do it.
He then wants to make an arthouse
Kool-Aid movie and when Martin Scorsese makes a pitch to him about Jonestown he
realizes the connection between in and gives him $250 million and buys the
script on-site. The fact that the head of publicity (a hysterical Hahn) tells
him this movie will be an economic disaster and is infuriated that Steve
Buscemi (no one knows how to pronounce his name) will be playing Jim Jones will
cause this movie to tank. Mike is willing to stand up for his principles until
Mill asks to see him in his office. Asked about he immediately goes back to an
earlier, lesser pitch and then tells Mill he bought Scorsese's script for the
sole purpose of killing it. Then he has to immediately backpedal to an earlier
director Mick Stoller and in order to do so he has to rehire Patty. "Why
do you keep lying?" his friend asks him. "I don't know!" he
shouts to himself. Of course he ends up being invited to Charlize Theron's
party, of course Scorsese is there and when he learns his movie has been killed
he bursts into tears – and I won't give away the punchline.
At this point it might very well
be a cliché to call The Studio 'a love letter to filmmaking'. Watching
it I find that genuinely refreshing because so many of the bitter satires of
anything these days are so contemptuous to their field (I speak of Veep and
Silicon Valley in particular) that it's clear they hate every part of
it. The Studio is different because while it is not blind to the
nastiness and ridiculous nature of the industry, it also acknowledges that
there are still so many wonderful things about it as well. And that's best
reflected in Rogen's character himself.
Matt may hate what Hollywood has
become but every time he talks about films and what they are you can tell he
still loves the process and what great cinema can be. That's refreshing in so
many series where the protagonist has often been too cynical about their own
industry. Matt is closer in spirit to Janine Teague and even Ted Lasso about his
view towards his job than Selina Meyer was about hers and Hollywood can kill
your love even faster than politics.
This is shown in the second
episode 'The Oner'. Matt has insisted on going to see the shooting of a film
where Sarah Polley is planning to do a one-shot take. He's talking about it
eagerly with his best friend Sal (Barinholtz) who has been trying to talk him
out of coming the whole day, saying it's going to screw things up. This is true
during every part of process as Matt can't hide his fanboy attitude and Patty,
who is there, is pissed that Sal couldn't talk him out of it. If this shot gets
messed up the stars are going to be leaving for a day and the film will be
delayed for a month.
Polley is willing to go along
with this because she wants to get the rights to a Rolling Stones song. Much of
the fun comes from watching Matt tell everyone 'Pretend I'm not here' and then
keeps inserting himself into the process. This leads to missed take after
missed take and eventually he attempts to go but then Greta Lee tells him how
much she loves what he did and he immediately gets charmed. (Greta just wants
to use the corporate jet for the PR tour.) Things just keep getting worse and
worse and finally Matt and Sal are forced to flee the set – and again I'll
withhold the punchline.
The episode is supposedly shot in
one-take but that's the point and considering how many references there are to
one-take shots in the episode it would have been a cheat if it wasn't. Watching
this I'm reminded of the pretention of Adolescence by comparison: The
Studio uses it and talks to the people who admire these kinds of things as
the often pretentious people they are, while still respecting the effort.
The most recent episode 'The
Note' has to do with the screening of the most recent Ron Howard movie which
everybody wants to see. It's too long because of a pretentious scene at the end
and it's Matt's job to tell Howard to cut it. He doesn't want to do it and
keeps fobbing the job off on everyone else, first his assistant and then Sal.
Eventually he learns that the scene is a tribute to Howard's dead cousin and he
forces Sal to fake having a dead cousin in order to use therapy. Barinholtz
makes it clear why he earned his Emmy nomination in this scene when he starts
out faking one in order to get there and is eventually so moved by Howard's
story that he ends up convinced by his own lie.
The punchline is that Resnick is
afraid to give Howard the note. Despite Howard having a reputation as a nice
guy, apparently when he was screening A Beautiful Mind Mike naively said
that they should say Paul Bettany's character was imaginary the whole time –
and Howard took him apart in front of every director in Hollywood. Mike has spent
the entire episode afraid to give him this note, because he hopes Howard
doesn't remember it. But it turns out Howard does remember it – and recounts
the entire incident and becomes even meaner each time. Finally Mike, humiliated
for the second time, gets angry and says what he should have said all along and
the two get into a fight. That's not the punch line for this episode – and
again I won't dare spoil it.
By this point I can understand
completely why The Studio got all the nominations it did. Rogen is
hysterical as someone who is both a cinephile and something of a milquetoast,
someone who loves movies but doesn't understand where he is with the talent.
O'Hara once again shows why she is one of our greatest comic actresses and in
conjunction with her work in The Last of Us this same year, one of our
most versatile ones. Hahn, who has spent a lot of time doing slightly darker
roles, is clearly have the time of her life playing a publicist who has
absolutely no filter with the executives and restraint with the talent. And
Barinholtz is essentially playing the buddy in this picture, someone who loves
movies as much as his friend does but has slightly more reality.
I also understand why Scorsese,
Howard and Cranston received Guest Actor nominations and am slightly shocked
Sarah Polley didn't get one. It's in the cameos of talent that the meanness
shows but in a kind of biting, sarcastic way. Not since Ricky Gervais's Extras
has a comedy series so mined the material of cameos of talent who they are
behind the screen; the only difference is it's mostly directors. (I can't wait
to see Adam Scott and Zoe Kravitz's cameos.)
And it is an exquisitely directed
series as well. It's clear Rogen (along with Evan Goldberg, who co-wrote and
co-directed every episode) is clearly decided to add every cinematic trick in
the book to make us look like we're watching the kind of movie that Altman or DePalma
or, yes, Scorsese would make. (Griffin Mill is the name of the character Tim
Robbins played in The Player which is the most direct in joke I've
picked up.) Like so much else in The Studio it is done as both a loving
homage and a direct satire and I suspect we're looking for Easter eggs in this
the same way one does for comic books movies – which is an Easter egg itself.
I'm not willing yet to put The
Studio on my top ten list for 2025, nor am I yet convinced it deserves to
win Outstanding Comedy Series over Hacks. But as a critics who loves
film as much as Rogen and the showrunners do I can't help but admire and
respect the effort he's put into making this series and doing it with far less
cynicism than the subject would call for. That would be the easy way to do this
but like Remick, there's someone who genuinely loves art in every scene of the
show. The Studio isn't as great as everyone says it is – but it almost
lives up to the hype.
My score: 4.5 stars.
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