The Studio: Seth Rogen buries a certain Hollywood in a hilarious satirical series (critic)
The series records the last rattle of an industry transformed by platforms, and now only in search of profitability. But beware: it’s very stinging.
Welcome to the burial. Open coffin ceremony but no bodies to cry: we are about to put in the ground a certain idea of American cinema, both ambitious and general public. The causes of death are multiple: COVVID, hegemony of platforms, public disinterest and blue fear of the studios not to make their investments profitable.
In this Hollywood at the end of the race, Matt Remick (impeccable Seth Rogen, also co-creator and co-director of the series) acts as a dinosaur. This passionate cinephile is propelled to the head of a crisis production company, Continental Studios. His dream: relaunching the machine by making films of major authors, in the right of the Hollywood of the 70s and 80s. His nightmare: a shareholder who swears by profitability and easy projects. So with his small group of faithful, Matt tries to reconcile the irreconcilable, sailing between absurd meetings with marketing, chaotic filming, impossible decisions, low blows, egotal stars and the permanent terror of the fatal misstep.
Scathing and hilarious satire, The studio Press where it hurts, observing half-fascinated, half-atteroid, the agony of a system and the passage of forced witness from the old-fashioned studios to Netflix and others. We knew, of course, but that does not prevent radiography from being as dizzying as depressing. Because behind the varnish of the comedy, the observation is relentless: the Hollywood industry has capitulated, swallowed by the logic of “content” which acts the end of cinema as an important cultural object (the scene where Matt tries to defend the value of his profession in the face of oncologists’ pediatricians is extremely tasty).
The series skillfully records the latter groan by putting the package on the form (sublime photo, almost twilight; sequence plans which always support the story or the subject …), to better denounce the disappearance of an artistic world from which each seems to be madly making fun (even the old projectionist of the studio prefers digital to film).
Carried by a gold casting (Kathryn Hahn, Bryan Cranston, Ike Barinholtz, Catherine O’Hara, Chase Su Wonders) as well as a avalanche of guests in their own roles (special mention to the self -deprecation of Martin Scorse, Ron Howard and Zoë Kravitz), The studio does not – Rare thing – than to improve from episode to episode, up to a furious final final at the Cinemacon of Las Vegas. Only one uncertainty will remain: what content will you be ready to consume after that?
The Studio, ten episodes to see on Apple TV+
