‘The Studio’ Review: Seth Rogen Crafts a Rich Satire of the Hollywood Machine

Is there a major comic actor who purely loves movies more than Seth Rogen?

In Hollywood history, there may be comedians with better track records (though Rogen’s is well above average, both in his comic vehicles and his occasional forays into serious-actor respectability). But it’s hard to think of anyone who seems so excited to be making cinema, whether enlisting David Gordon Green to bring both indie lyricism and ’80s action-comedy violence into the stoner buddy comedy “Pineapple Express” or staging a full-scale apocalypse with dozens of stars playing themselves in “This Is the End,” his directorial debut alongside longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg.

Now Rogen and Goldberg, alongside co-creators Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez have undertaken one of their most ambitious projects yet with “The Studio.” It’s a satire of the contemporary and constantly imperiled Hollywood machine, shot in richly cinematic textures and a series of uninterrupted takes, featuring an ensemble packed with both stars in major roles and in playing-themselves cameos. Naturally, it’s a streaming TV series that will never be shown on the big screen that its characters so cherish.

Though the show’s streaming status also works as one more layer of satire — for these characters, the very idea of being acquired by a “tech company” is hellish torture — Rogen and Goldberg also have the episodic bona fides that many similarly ambitious streaming projects do not. The episodes, which mostly hover around the half-hour mark, are well structured and strongly conceptualized, which makes sense from a technical point of view; when almost every individual scene is constructed as a single take, they need to do more than just usher along a poky master plot. These sequences need to move — and they do, sometimes to the point of exhaustion.

The show follows the promotion and rocky tenure of Matt Remick (Rogen), a longtime development executive appointed to run Continental Studios now that his former boss and mentor Patty (Catherine O’Hara) has been ousted by owner Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston, in a recurring role). Griffin shares his name with the callow exec played by Tim Robbins in the classic Robert Altman satire “The Player,” which opens with a famous long tracking shot — though the single-take acrobatics of “The Studio” owe a bit more to the recent “Birdman,” complete with a percussive anxiety-attack score. Matt is under constant stress because, well, he’s making theatrical movies in a post-streaming world, and worse (for him), he actually loves cinema, just as Rogen obviously does.

This sincere love gives Matt an overlay of additional anxiety as he yearns for acceptance from the artists he’s bankrolling; he wants to feel like a filmmaker, even though everyone expects him to mainly function as a bean-counting suit. That desire creates situations not unlike those Michael Scott found himself in on “The Office”; Matt is a savvier character, but he gives off a similar sense of having been promoted a step or two beyond his actual skill level. He disdains projects like a feature-length adaptation of Kool-Aid (imagined by the show with hilarious, borderline frightening accuracy), fears for his job too intensely to shun them completely, and then attempts to convince himself that they might actually work on a creative level.

Matt’s insecurities, and the frequency with which his personal nightmares seem to come true, are a clever generator of story tension while also never feeling all that believable. For Matt to get into a series of predicaments this embarrassing — and a lot of episodes hinge on precisely that — there have to be a lot of figures who ultimately refuse to defer to him in any way, not just as part of business negotiations but in basic everyday interactions. A major studio head being treated like a wannabe flunky is doubtless part of the joke, and there are other technical aspects of the show — the brown-heavy, ’70s-inspired fashions and the richly grainy texture of the cinematography — that obviously point to a heightened, stylized environment where a Rogen-style goofball can both wield enormous power and command almost no respect. But the show offers plenty of time to nitpick its reality regardless, because Matt’s epic screw-ups, as well-choreographed as they often are, start to feel repetitive well before the season’s ten episodes are through.

That’s partially because Rogen plays up his manic side, which is often hilarious in small bursts but dominates large chunks of many episodes here. (The deadpan dialogue riffing that made him such a distinctive TV star in shows like “Freaks & Geeks,” “Undeclared” and the recent “Platonic” is largely absent.) The show’s attempts to create a mini-workplace sitcom out of Matt, his crude development-exec buddy Sal (Ike Barinholtz, in the Ike Barinholtz role), marketing head Maya (Kathryn Hahn) and lower-level exec Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders) also sometimes feel at odds with the show’s satirical world, but their easy chemistry does help leaven the number of scenes where Rogen runs around in a barking panic. One of the best episodes drifts away from Matt to focus on an escalating, unhinged battle between Sal and Quinn, with some uproariously orchestrated slapstick; another highlight has the group putting their heads together to attack a casting issue (on the Kool-Aid movie, naturally) that they may have created themselves out of thin air.

That’s the thing: When “The Studio” is really cooking, as with a detective-film parody that comes early in the season, it’s very good — funny, inventive, affectionate toward the movies while skeptical toward their industry. But in about half the episodes, the spectacle of watching things blow up in Matt’s face during virtuoso oners (including oners used in an episode dedicated to capturing a great oner) becomes a bit like watching a show that keeps staging big climactic shoot-outs over and over.

Despite its command of the TV form, maybe “The Studio” would have been better off as a movie after all.

“The Studio” premieres March 26 on Apple TV+.

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