This article appeared in the April 25, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

“The Promotion,” Episode 1 of The Studio (Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, 2025)

William Goldman famously summed up his 1983 memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, by proclaiming with a Socratic flourish that “nobody knows anything.” This phrase has since endured as shorthand for the futility of trying to talk authoritatively—or definitively—about an entertainment-industrial complex where people regularly get rich underestimating the taste of the American public and even self-proclaimed insiders are frequently out of the loop.

The paradox of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s new Apple TV series The Studio—which is now just over halfway through its first-season order of 10 episodes—is that it tries to have Goldman’s koan both ways. It’s a behind-the-scenes satire teeming with references to a present where podcasters and shitposters have supplanted the trades as sources of up-to-the-minute information and elevated horror is the most cost-effective genre (“Coming soon from the makers of Smile: Wink”). The Studio’s M.O. is to filter superiority through self-deprecation: by chronicling the follies of a group of executive-class know-nothings at a major Hollywood production company, it seeks to prove that its creators know at least something of what they speak.

To be fair, Canadian expatriates Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have spent enough time in the proverbial trenches to try shitting where they eat, and they’ve made enough famous friends to lend their back-lot roman à clef the requisite A-list authenticity. Cramming the frame with notable faces is a Hollyworld-building tactic cribbed from Robert Altman’s acrid 1992 comedy The Player, which Rogen and Goldberg treat like a totem as well as a stylistic how-to manual; the show’s cinematography, by Adam Newport-Berra (who shot 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco), primarily comprises serpentine long takes.

The first half of season one features appearances from Martin Scorsese, Sarah Polley, and Ron Howard—Oscar winners all, dutifully doing their best imitations of themselves. Meanwhile, the dialogue is peppered with zingers designed to resonate with the Letterboxd set, like one character’s observation that A24 is the studio of choice for “pansexual mixologists living in Bed-Stuy.” Recall that early preview screenings of A24’s Babygirl included souvenir cocktail-recipe cards, and the joke sort of lands. Again: the tone of The Studio is nothing if not knowing. But the question of whether Rogen and Goldberg are genuinely unveiling the mishegoss of their milieu, or peddling received wisdom as insights gleaned behind frenemy lines, remains wide open.

Handsomely gaunt beneath a salt-and-pepper stubble, Rogen plays Matt Remick, the newly appointed—and perpetually frazzled—head of the fictional Continental Studios, imagined as a legacy outfit whose glory years intersected with those of the New Hollywood. The casting is apt insofar as it reflects Rogen’s own, seemingly real ambivalence about his Apatow-affirmed celebrity. As anybody who’s seen Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011) already knows, Rogen can be a terrific seriocomic actor, and he sells Matt’s angst of being caught between honest (if populist) cinephilia and schtickier instincts. On a recent visit to the Criterion Closet—a safe space for celebrities to ratify or rehabilitate their image as ball knowers—Rogen flashed a copy of the 1928 Buster Keaton vehicle The Cameraman, an interesting choice suggesting aspirations of slapstick rigor. Formalist flexing is in The Studio’s DNA, but the show’s elaborate oners most frequently evoke Birdman (2014), a movie whose faux-sophistication about showbiz (and everything else) made one long for the virtues of honest ignorance.

The best episode of The Studio so far is the first, “The Promotion,” which briskly sets up the show’s universe, beginning with Matt’s unexpected ascent to a job formerly held by his disgraced mentor, Patty (Catherine O’Hara, predictably terrific as an Amy Pascal manqué), and his subsequent reluctance to help shovel franchise IP slop—in this case, a live-action Kool-Aid movie. Even before the Curb Your Enthusiasm–style plotline takes off, with our hero clumsily trying to enfold a Scorsese dream project about the Jonestown massacre into his own high-concept boondoggle, the symbolic connotations of Kool-Aid diagnose a movie culture on dialysis. The power brokers are people like Matt’s boss, CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston, in a role that was probably at least offered to Tim Robbins), who’s almost proud of his broken taste buds; like you-know-who, he’s content to keep on drinking that garbage.

The predictable use of Scorsese as an axiom of artistic integrity is complicated, at least slightly, by the director’s willingness here to kid his own recent dependence on digital lucre (including a couple of hundred million courtesy of Apple). The punchline to the whole thing—the way that Matt’s earnestly narcissistic self-image as a keeper of the cinematic flame keeps blowing up in his face—is quite satisfyingly engineered. So much so that Rogen and Goldberg see fit to repeat this basic structure in subsequent installments, over and over again, with modestly amusing variations, a few good one-liners here and there, and inherently diminishing returns.

In other words: they’re making television. Or, if you like, quality streaming content—a format that doesn’t necessarily contradict the Movie Love at the heart of The Studio, but doesn’t exactly validate it, either. Ideally, satire should manifest as some kind of intervention against the status quo, as in The Player, which not only had some teeth—its greenlight-happy protagonist being an actual killer and all—but used them to bite the hand that feeds. Where Altman had a real and bottomless appetite for professional self-destruction, Rogen and Goldberg are nibblers, chewing over their regurgitated ideas about the tension between art and commerce so that they go down easy. Having nice-guy icon Ron Howard pantomime snarky, above-it-all arrogance would be a facile joke even if The Simpsons hadn’t already done it 25 years ago; better to have taken him to task for his role in getting J.D. Vance to within a heartbeat of the presidency.

An episode entitled “The Missing Reel,” about a troubled neo-noir being helmed by Olivia Wilde (depicted as being at odds with her crew for going “Full Fincher” with her micromanagement), name-checks Chinatown (1974) without evoking even a shred of incestuous, made-in-L.A. corruption. The Studio’s insistence on its own jovial disposability is less a get-out-of-jail-free card than evidence of having been made by comedians content to patrol their own cozy comfort zone. “Fine is not good enough,” insists Wilde at one point in “The Missing Reel.” She said it, not me.

Adam Nayman is a critic, author, and lecturer in Toronto. He writes for The Ringer, Sight and Sound, and The New Republic, and has written books on David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen Brothers.