Seth Rogen’s Hollywood Satire The Studio Is the First Great New Show of 2025

“If it was up to me,” an idealistic Hollywood executive played by Seth Rogen assures his assistant in the series premiere of The Studio, “we’d be focusing on making the next Rosemary’s Baby or Annie Hall or, you know, some great film that wasn’t directed by a f-ckin’ pervert.” Then, suddenly, it is up to him. Upon arriving at the offices of his employer, the fictional Continental Studios, Rogen’s Matt Remick learns his boss has just been fired. The studio’s mercurial CEO (Bryan Cranston) offers him the job—but only if he agrees to make a Kool-Aid movie. Matt doesn’t hesitate before replying in the wall-smashing affirmative: “Oh! Yeah!”

Ten minutes into the Apple TV+ comedy, just about everything we need to know about the new head of Continental is apparent. Movies are Matt’s world. As we soon discover, he has no significant other, no kids, no real social life. His knowledge of cinema, from action franchises and Oscar winners to obscure indies and the international art house, rivals that of any film geek. And, for the most part, he has good intentions; when he gets his promotion, he keeps a promise to make his assistant (Chase Sui Wonders’ Quinn) a creative exec. Yet he’s so desperate to succeed in an industry that is now, itself, desperate to succeed in the face of technological upheaval, labor unrest, audience fragmentation, and a post-pandemic slump in theater attendance, that he is in effect no better than any other spineless suit. Which is precisely how the filmmakers and actors Matt reveres see him. Worse still, he’s insecure enough that this constant rejection sends him into a spiral of self-loathing buffoonery that gives The Studio, created by Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez, the rhythms of a Curb Your Enthusiasm, Studio Head Edition.

The Studio is a timely, funny, and exuberantly—though not uncritically—cinephilic panorama of a business caught in the latest battle of a war between art and commerce that has raged since studios like Warner Bros. were still run by their namesakes. It’s also 2025’s best new show to date, and one of Hollywood’s sharpest self-portraits in ages—which is saying something, considering how much the entertainment industry loves to celebrate and satirize itself.

Auteurs dabbling in television love to frame their shows as six- or 10- or 13-hour films, as though there’s something inherently superior about the cinematic form. But, as proudly as The Studio wears its love for movies—specifically the good, old-fashioned, non-IP-based ones—it is also unapologetic about being built for TV. Delightfully episodic, it throws Matt, his underlings, and the famous people who are always guest-starring, often as themselves, into a new debacle in each half-hour. There’s a kinetic L.A. noir riff, in which the studio head, donning a trench coat and fedora, takes it upon himself to investigate the disappearance of a reel of the Chinatown rip-off Olivia Wilde is directing. Another episode, set at a work gala for the pediatric oncologist (Rebecca Hall) Matt is dating, finds him struggling to convince her physician colleagues that the scatological Johnny Knoxville zombie movie he’s working on is just as important as their life-saving profession and features a particularly Curb-esque escalation of his insecure antics.

Matt makes a great antihero in part because he’s the perfect foil for everyone around him. His creative compromises can be devastating to the ambitious Quinn, who has yet to become fully jaded. His sleazy work buddy Sal (Ike Barinholtz) couldn’t care less about art but is, to Matt’s eternal consternation, beloved by the talent because he’s fun and chill. The cynical, trend-chasing marketing executive Maya (Kathryn Hahn, playing refreshingly against type) makes Matt look principled by contrast. Some combination of his guilt and his craving for the approval of a maternal figure drives him to offer a lucrative producing deal to his embittered predecessor and mentor, Patty (Catherine O’Hara, hilarious as ever but not onscreen as much as you’d hope the second-billed cast member would be). Matt may be a selfish, cowardly fool, but his sincere love of film makes it impossible to root against him—especially when the alternative is letting Sal or Maya fill Continental’s slate with a whole Powdered Drink Mix Cinematic Universe.

Indeed, the barrel-scraping KoolAid project—which Matt stupidly tries to reshape into a self-aware, Barbie-style masterpiece by buying a Martin Scorsese script about Jonestown’s Kool-Aid-drinking suicide cult—is not the only thing the studio has in development. Rogen and his co-creators round out the season with an Indiewood period drama, directed by Sarah Polley and starring Greta Lee, that Matt can’t stop himself from messing with during an unwanted set visit that puts the entire crew on edge. The executives laugh, cry, and rejoice as they screen a crime drama written and directed by Ron Howard, only to nod off during an incongruous, mind-numbing coda that brings the run time to nearly three hours. The problem is, Howard has final cut, and no one at Continental has the guts to confront him about his terrible ending.

For all its madcap humor, one serious question The Studio raises—a question relevant not just to Hollywood, but also to media, publishing, the music industry, and other creative fields—is: Can the time-honored “one for them, one for me” approach, often associated with Scorsese and Steven Soderbergh, which uses popcorn fare to fund artistically fulfilling projects, still work amid the economic pressures of the 2020s? Or must the Matt Remicks of the world keep greenlighting another and another and another one for them, while delaying the “me” script that’s supposed to justify such schlock until a more financially favorable moment that might never come? Who is this philistine “them,” anyway, if not the executive who, instead of defending Scorsese’s vision, placates his boss with a slapped-together promo clip of an animated Kool-Aid Man doing a TikTok dance? To put it in terms Matt might understand: The call is coming from inside the office.

The Studio draws on film knowledge as encyclopedic as Matt’s own, shouting out film-school staples like the 1964 propaganda masterpiece I Am Cuba while sending up such current phenomena as Christopher Nolan’s outsize influence and the horror franchise Smile. Yet what makes the show feel so contemporary is its understanding that Hollywood isn’t just in decline; it has now fallen so far that the industry has become nostalgic for the human-scale action spectacles and contrived Oscar bait (Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, for example) it was making at the turn of the millennium, amid an earlier wave of nostalgia for the revolutionary New Hollywood of the ’70s. In that respect, its most important reference point is Robert Altman’s beloved 1992 film The Player.

Another profile of a dangerously stressed studio executive, The Player takes the form of a satirical thriller. Tim Robbins stars as Griffin Mill, a linen-clad striver driven mad by his one-sided rivalry with a new colleague and a series of threatening notes apparently sent by a jilted screenwriter. By the end of the movie, Griffin has gotten away with murder—and his descent into violence has been rewarded with a promotion to, yes, studio head. Listen carefully in The Studio’s premiere, and you’ll notice that Cranston’s gonzo CEO character is also named Griffin Mill. Whether he’s meant to be literally the same person as The Player’s protagonist or just a callback to the movie isn’t clear. (Cranston dresses and acts more like the notoriously debauched ’60s and ’70s Paramount head Robert Evans.) Either way, it’s a choice that implies the previous generation’s monsters failed upward to become the brain-dead, pandering bottom-line obsessives of today. That Kool-Aid TikTok dance? Mill can’t get enough of it.

As bleak as its perspective on movie-making circa 2025 can be, The Studio is never a bummer. Its rapid-fire wit, Rogen’s exquisitely neurotic lead performance, and the verisimilitude of plots driven by insider-y podcasts and sales pitches at conventions for theater owners, along with all those endearingly self-effacing celebrity cameos (another echo of The Player), certainly keep things interesting. Most compellingly, the show balances frustration with affection in a way that few recent Hollywood self-portraits have done. Period dramas, from Damien Chazelle’s chaotic Babylon to Quentin Tarantino’s wistful Once Upon a Time .. . in Hollywood, play like eulogies for a medium that’s already dead. Contemporary satires like HBO’s already-canceled, low-hanging-fruit 2024 Marvel spoof The Franchise paint a likeness so empty and unflattering, you might come out convinced that there’s nothing of value left in American cinema to salvage.

The Studio knows that the war for the future of movies is worth fighting, even if the generals are weak and the conditions on the ground miserable. “I got into all this because, you know, I love movies. But now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them,” Matt confesses to Patty in the premiere. It’s true, she concedes: His new job is a “meat grinder.” And yet, “when it all comes together and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.”