‘The Studio’ Is Fantastic So Far

Sunday, 30 March 2025

With season 2 of Severance complete (with a remarkable bang), Apple TV+ has slid right into a new prestige series, The Studio, starring (and co-created by) Seth Rogen as the newly-appointed chief of the fictional and dysfunctional Continental Studios in Hollywood.

Two episodes in (out of 10 for the debut season), and it is fucking amazing. So far it feels a bit like a cross between Entourage, The Larry Sanders Show, Boogie Nights, and maybe a touch of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But the biggest influence and inspiration is clearly Robert Altman’s 1992 masterpiece The Player, almost certainly the best Hollywood movie about Hollywood moviemaking that ever was or will be made.

What The Studio and The Player share is that they’re about the struggle to create great cinematic art within a corporate studio world run by unartistic know-it-all self-important status-obsessed dullards driven by formula and fads — and, simultaneously, they are themselves almost unfathomably complicated and intricate works of cinematic art. They are what they’re about. They achieve what the characters within them fear is no longer achievable. When you get to episode 2 of The Studio, just keep asking yourself “Wait, how are they getting this shot?” The lighting, my god. The whole thing is just an outpouring of homage to the opening shot of The Player, which of course itself calls back, explicitly, to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.

The Studio is, thus far, engaging, surprising, funny, gorgeous, clever, and cinematically ambitious. It’s really quite a thing. I have no idea what’s coming in episodes 3–10, so maybe this piece will look a bit premature, if not foolish, in two months. But if the rest of season one is anything like the first two episodes, The Studio is a classic in the making.

The thought also occurs to me that this might be the don’t-over-think-it answer to just what the hell Apple is doing making original shows and movies in the first place. Perhaps Apple’s leadership simply believes, as I do, that cinema is the grandest and greatest form of art the world has ever seen — one that encompasses acting, writing, photography and/or illustration, and music — and but that great cinema is expensive and delicate and needs, from deep-pocketed studios and their deeper-pocketed corporate parents, more than patrons, but champions. And that in a media landscape where such champions of cinema-as-art and art-as-an-essential-public-good are fewer and fewer, it is Apple’s not just opportunity but obligation to step up to the plate.

I’ve long thought that one of the minor tragedies of Steve Jobs’s second act is that the timing just didn’t work out to sell Pixar to Apple, instead of to Disney. But make no mistake, a love and appreciation for great cinema is not outside Apple’s DNA. No streamer has a higher hit rate for quality shows. Their movies mostly stink so far, but maybe that’s just the learning curve. The Gorge, for example, feels like an Apple TV movie because it’s so decidedly meh. Not horrible, but not good in any way beyond its intriguing elevator-pitch concept. Wolfs was better but still a grand disappointment given its pedigree. But when it comes to shows, no one is doing better. Severance deserves all its acclaim and attention, and Ben Stiller delivered a season 2 finale that’s arguably the best 78 minutes of filmmaking I’ve seen this decade. And The Studio, to me, feels like an Apple TV show — not because of how it looks, what it’s about, or who’s in it, but simply because it’s so good. Netflix almost never makes shows like this. Neither does HBO now that’s its been subsumed by “Max”. Peacock et al don’t even try.¹