[COLUMN] With The Franchise and The Studio, Hollywood Puts Its Existential Crisis on Screen | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Studio, now streaming on Apple TV+. It’s very charming.

Looking at pop culture, it feels a little bit like Hollywood is working through something.

The Studio is the new Apple TV+ show from the creative team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, along with Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez. The show is a situational comedy built around the struggles of studio executive Matt Remick (Rogen), who finds himself appointed head of production at Continental Studios by the corporate owner Griffith Mills (Bryan Cranston). Remick’s creative ambitions are somewhat stifled by Mills’ first corporate mandate: a KoolAid movie.

The Studio is a show about the state of modern Hollywood. Remick genuinely loves movies. He drives around Hollywood in a classic convertible with the vanity plate “STD HEAD.” (“It’s studio head, not STD-head!” Matt protests.) He longs for the validation of the town’s talent and to secure his own place in cinematic history. In the show’s second episode, “The Oner”, Matt insists on being on set as Sarah Polley (herself) films a “magic hour oner” that will be “a famous shot in a movie.”

Matt finds that the system is set up to prevent even a modicum of creativity from getting through the machine. “I honestly just have one strong reservation about you,” Mills observes as prepares to offer Matt the job that the executive has always wanted. “I’ve heard you are really into artsy-fartsy filmmaking bullshit. That you’re obsessed with actors and directors liking you, rather than being obsessed with making this studio as much money as possible.”

The season premiere, “The Promotion”, finds Matt desperate to prove that “prestige films and box office hits … are not mutually exclusive” by making “the auteur-driven, Oscar-winning KoolAid film” directed by none other than Martin Scorsese (himself). Matt plans to smuggle Scorsese’s planned movie about the Jonestown Massacre in under the title KoolAid. As the studio’s head of publicity, Maya (Katherine Hahn), gasps, “You want to make a fucking fancy KoolAid movie?”

The Studio is the second half-hour sitcom about the absurdity of modern Hollywood to emerge within the past year, following on from The Franchise on HBO. The Franchise is set on the production of a troubled superhero blockbuster made by Maximum Studios, following the cast and crew as they stumble through one absurdity after another. It seems appropriate that these two projects should come from HBO and Apple TV+, two of the few remaining bastions of prestige television.

Both The Studio and The Franchise are very “inside baseball.” They both draw very heavily and very specifically from Hollywood history. It’s possible to draw direct analogues. On The Franchise, the baseball-cap-wearing Pat Shannon (Darren Goldstein) is very obviously Kevin Feige, even if he differs in temperament. On The Studio, the fired-studio-chief-turned-powerhouse-producer Amy (Catherine O’Hara) is quite transparently former Sony head Amy Pascal.

Indeed, The Studio is saturated with real actors and directors playing themselves. It would spoil the season to provide a full list, but the two-episode premiere include Charlize Theron, Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Stoller, Sarah Polley and Greta Lee. In contrast, The Franchise had to make do by indirectly evoking Scorsese, having comic book movie studio executive Pat Shannon complain, “Fucking Scorsese’s at it again.”

To be fair, Hollywood has a long history of glamorizing the movie industry. There are plenty of films and television shows that romanticize the production of Hollywood classics, from Hitchcock to The Offer. The industry loves to tell stories of its own heroism, most obviously with movies like Argo. However, the industry also tends to enjoy telling stories about itself in moments of existential crisis, as with Singin’ in the Rain or Babylon.

What is interesting about The Franchise and The Studio derives from the framing of these shows as comedies. These are not abstract stories about a transition point in the history of Hollywood. They are instead television shows about the mechanisms that drive the modern studio system and how those structures are designed to be almost antithetical to quality. The Franchise and The Studio are about the decline of Hollywood, but they are also confessions.

In “Scene 36: The Invisible Jackhammer”, the second episode of The Franchise, Dagmara "Dag" Nwaeze (Lolly Adefope) asks her boss, Daniel Kumar (Himesh Patel), an existential question. “Have you ever thought, ‘Am I killing cinema?’” she wonders. “Because the, uh, Invisible Jackhammer got me thinking, what if you are? What if this isn't a dream factory? What if it's an abattoir, you know? And we've all got blood on our hands and fatty tissue on our faces and we're sat here, you know, eating sandwiches?”

In the first episode of The Studio, Matt finds himself grappling with a similar crisis of faith. He reflects that the art deco headquarters of Continental Films, which was “designed to literally be a temple of cinema”, now “feels much more like a tomb.” Matt confesses to Amy, “I got into all this because I love movies but now I have this fear that my job is ruin them.” This line is apparently drawn from Rogen’s own experience; an executive once said it to him while giving notes.

The Studio is very personal to Rogen. It is drawn from his own experiences. Many of those celebrity cameos are past collaborators. Theron co-starred with Rogen in Long Shot. Stoller directed Rogen in the two Neighbors movies. Polley directed Rogen in Take This Waltz. The decision to base Amy on Amy Pascal makes a great deal of sense given Pascal stepped down in the wake of the Sony email hack, which was allegedly conducted by North Korea in response to Rogen’s comedy The Interview.

More to the point, Rogen has spent years navigating the sort of insanity that he depicts in The Studio. Rogen has talked openly about the death of the midbudget comedy film, as its niche was swallowed by larger franchise fare. Along with Goldman, Rogen has talked about his own dabbling in big budget studio fare, the “fucking nightmare” experience of making The Green Hornet. Rogen has talked about having to budget his movies at a point low enough to avoid studio interference.

Both The Franchise and The Studio understand that Hollywood did not end up in this state by accident. These executives who lament the decline of Hollywood are complicit in that degradation. Rogen admits that he has asked himself, in his capacity as a producer of projects like The Boys and Preacher, “Am I making these things worse?” While the tendency of Hollywood stories about Hollywood is to self-mythologize, The Franchise and The Studio are more melancholic.

Like these projects, The Studio has a deep and abiding affection for the abstract idea of the movies and the art of filmmaking. The series is, in general, suffused with a deep nostalgia for New Hollywood. “I’m like thirty years too late to this fucking business,” opines Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders), Matt’s assistant. “If it was up to me we’d be focused on making the next Rosemary’s Baby or Annie Hall or, y’know, some great movie that wasn’t directed by a fucking pervert,” Matt agrees.

Continental Pictures feels like it is very overtly modelled on Paramount after it was purchased by Gulf+Western, with Amy consistently dropping references to legendary producer Robert Evans, even describing Mills as “some dime store Bob Evans.” Even the show’s visual language evokes classic Hollywood, with an emphasis on handheld photography and long takes that evokes both the New Hollywood of the 1970s and the ghost of it that haunts Robert Altman’s The Player.

Like these projects, The Studio has a deep and abiding affection for the abstract idea of the movies and the art of filmmaking. The show’s second episode, “The Oner”, is built about Sarah Polley’s attempts to capture a scene in a single impressive sweeping long take, and is itself shot (or edited to look like it was shot) as a single impressive sweeping long take. However, while The Studio clearly loves the movies as an artform, it maintains a healthy skepticism about those who make them.

The show borrows a lot from the rich vein of misanthropic sitcoms about terrible people. Rogen has cited The Larry Sanders Show as an obvious point of inspiration, along with Robert Altman’s The Player. The show also owes a lot to Larry David’s sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, which also frequently featured celebrities (including Martin Scorsese) playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Indeed, the cast includes a recurring role for Curb Your Enthusiasm breakout Keyla Monterroso Mejia.

In the style of The Larry Sanders Show or Curb Your Enthusiasm, Matt is consistently his own worst enemy. His shortsightedness and misplaced self-assuredness often hurt the very things that he claims to want to protect. He options Scorsese’s Jonestown Massacre script, allowing Mills to pressure him to kill the project to protect the KoolAid brand, which effectively means that Matt destroys Martin Scorsese’s last movie. In his rush to witness Polley filming her long-take, he abandons his convertible on set, accidentally ruining the climax of the shot.

This recurring motif goes a long way towards deflating the sort of self-importance that can permeate Hollywood stories about Hollywood. Still, it is interesting to wonder whether audiences are particularly interested in these explorations of Hollywood’s dysfunction. While The Franchise garnered mostly positive reviews, HBO opted not to pick it up for a second season. Ironically, the cable broadcaster’s schedule has become increasingly packed with its own franchises and brands.

Indeed, there is a knowing irony woven into the fabric of The Studio. This is a show that can no longer exist within the framework of the established studio system, and so had to be funded and distributed by Apple, one of the disruptors that is partially responsible for the recent chaos in Hollywood. The Studio itself becomes an excellent demonstration of the tension at play in the larger industry, and a snapshot of this very strange moment.