Seth Rogen was born to play the newly promoted Hollywood studio head in The Studio. With his gravelly voice, tousled appearance, and exuberance, balanced by whimsicality and a deep love of movies, he is also the co-creator and co-director of the ten episodes; it is clearly a labor of love. The conceit of The Studio is much like that of 2024’s The Franchise: each episode blasts, with utter savagery, the excesses and nonsenses of modern filmmaking. Backing up Rogen is a fine cast hamming up studio exec stereotypes, and real-life actors/directors (Zoë Kravitz, Dave Franco, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Ice Cube, and many more) feature regularly and to great effect. The fluid-extended-take cinematography of Adam Newport-Berra is superb, the music works, and the script roars. If you cannot raise a laugh at Rogen trying to justify his chosen career at a conference of pediatric oncologists, or debasing himself to receive a barest “thank you” at the Golden Globes, or disrupting a sensitive sunset scene, or tracking down a missing reel of film … well, you don’t have a funny bone. If everything can feel a bit over the top, the humanity of this first season is rescued, with fine subtlety, by Rogen projecting not only his character’s excesses but also his workaholic loneliness and his abiding love of film. Highly recommended.
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