For decades, film versus television felt like Hollywood’s forever war. Cinema was dominated by the biggest stars and the greatest directors – who sneered at the lesser medium – yet television reached vast audiences and inspired more ardent fanaticism. As the years passed, the differences became smaller – actors and filmmakers switched format with fickle abandon – and, grudgingly, the balance of power seemed to tip in favour of the small screen. The Studio, a new 10-episode series on AppleTV+, is a TV show about the travails of the film industry, and a charming, funny (though perhaps inadvertent) PR campaign for cinema’s survival.
Seth Rogen is Matt Remick, an executive at Continental Studios, an ailing Hollywood powerhouse. When his boss and mentor Patty (Catherine O’Hara) is ousted, Matt gets the big job, running the whole shebang. Matt is an old-school cinephile; a lover of grainy reels of film who’s phobic about being “lame”. But his new job challenges preoccupations. Bigwigs at the studio want Matt to focus on commercially minded filmmaking. “If Warner Bros can make a billion dollars off the plastic tits of a pussyless doll,” the studio’s chair (played, in cameo, by Bryan Cranston) tells Matt. “We should be able to make two billion dollars off the legacy brand of Kool-Aid.” And so, Matt finds himself thrown into the frenetic, cutthroat upper echelons of the industry, where art and business do daily battle.
