I didn’t watch last night’s Emmys, where Apple TV’s comedy show The Studio cleaned up with a record-breaking number of awards. I did, however, watch the entirety of that show while lying around on my couch exhausted from a morning long run. As its reviews and praise from my peers noted, it’s pretty good.
The Studio follows film executive Matt Remick, played by Seth Rogen, as he’s catapulted into leading Continental Studios after his previous boss is unceremoniously fired. Matt is passionate about movies, and passionate about his job, but those two desires quickly come into conflict: he wants to make art, while the studio basically just needs him to make money. This puts him in conflict with actors, writers, and directors he admires, as he constantly tries to play both sides and mostly ends up leaving everyone unhappy, especially himself.
For example, in the first episode, swiftly after being promoted, Matt is required to get a movie about Kool-Aid made as a brand tie-in. He’s presented with the kind of bog-standard script you’d expect for such an idea from a big studio, but he also gets a pitch from Martin Scorsese to make a high-budget, serious film about the Jonestown massacre, which he recalls famously featured Kool-Aid. (Incidentally, it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid that the victims of Jonestown poisoned and drank, but the cultural connection is indelible enough for The Studio’s plotline to stand.) You can see where this is going: Matt decides Scorsese’s film will be his Kool-Aid movie, an idea that honestly sounds bold and interesting, but one that obviously isn’t going to work. The rest of the episode is then Matt saying “yes” to everyone until he’s forced to say “no” and then live with the consequences.
Many episodes take this structure, with Matt promising something to an actor or director that obviously conflicts with the studio’s mandate to make billions of dollars. But Matt himself complicates what would otherwise make The Studio a more political but potentially repetitive showcase of corporations versus artists. He’s desperate for all these famous creative people to like him, to see him as one of their own. Instead of being a champion for them against the studio structure, he just comes off as sad and sycophantic, saying anything to anyone when actually taking a moment to make the best decision as a leader would probably make these artists at least respect him, if not actually want to be his friends.
This is most borne out in a late-season episode at (fittingly for when I watched the show) an awards show, where he realizes that, given his role, he won’t actually win an award for the movie he helped make happen from on-high. What follows is a desperate night of attempting to get the movie’s actress to thank him, seething with jealousy when one of his colleagues gets thrown into the spotlight and looking with envy at executives who seem to be more easily part of their artists’ lives. Through the course of the night, we see him become self-reflective, aware of what he’s doing and how it’s driving those around him away. He pushes himself to try to be happy for others instead of just thinking of himself, something that comes closer to getting him what he wants than trying to force it.
Matt’s personal growth comes a bit late in the 10-episode season, in many ways an easy setup for a second season. And, when it does, it’s shaky at best. But hopefully this will help avoid the pitfall I think another Apple TV show, Shrinking, fell into: by ending its first season with its characters maturing and coming together, its second season felt saccharine and conflictless. There’s plenty of mess left for Matt and his colleagues, with Matt’s own growth and conflict between characters like his second-in-command Sal and his newly-promoted creative executive Quinn, alongside larger questions of the future of the studio under his leadership.
When the show first came out back in March, the reviews I read made it seem like a show best enjoyed if you’re a fan of movies, which I have to admit I’m not terribly. But I know enough about the form from my undergrad dramatic writing education to appreciate the ways it plays with tropes and forms (what show about movies could get by without a Chinatown reference?). And I’ll admit that as someone who’s had to play “the suit” to artists as an editor, producer, and leader, I often felt for Matt’s struggle of feeling like he’s on the outside, incidental if not the actual enemy of the work he is, in his own way, essential to. I’ve been on both sides of this equation, though in far less lucrative circumstances: the artist fighting against what I saw as arbitrary restrictions or obsessions with money, and someone in more of a leadership role trying to balance financial or physical realities against what a creator is demanding. I’ve had to tell a director they can’t have an expensive prop or complicated lighting setup for a play, hissing arguments in the hallway as an audience files in and learning to accept that sometimes you have to live with someone thinking you’re an asshole when you have other productions and artists to think of and a limited budget on your hands. I don’t think The Studio wants you to sympathize with Matt, or with the people in suits in general, but it also doesn’t want to paint artists simply as big heroes stymied by money.
While I wasn’t as enamored of the two-part finale as I feel like the show wanted me to be, finding it a bit too slapstick, there are a lot of great episodes (besides the awards show episode, one where Matt dates a doctor was excellent). I’m a little annoyed to have liked it, because I keep meaning to cancel my ever-more-expensive Apple TV subscription, while Apple puts out shows I want to keep watching with just enough frequency to keep me paying. But I can see why The Studio won so many awards last night, and I’m curious to see what its second season does.
