Matt Remick desperately wants to be considered important. His problem is that he’s recently become a Hollywood mogul, which is like getting a job as a DEI consultant right now. The timing’s not great.
This week, in the best episode of the debut season of the fizzy Apple TV+ series “The Studio,” Remick, played with impeccable neediness by Seth Rogen, arrives at the Golden Globes full of anticipation, only to be disappointed to find influencers taking selfies, instead of famous actors wanting to talk to him. Pushed aside by Charli D’Amelio, he strikes a weary tone: “I remember when the red carpet of the Golden Globes actually stood for something.”
It’s a wonderfully dry and absurd joke, treating the most superficial part of awards season with preposterous gravity. But it’s also funny because Rogen says the line as if he’s straining to play a part that doesn’t quite fit him, a man of consequence.
“The Studio,” which was just renewed for a second season, belongs to the genre of Hollywood satire in which fictional characters interact with real celebrities playing presumably more vain and craven versions of themselves (see also “Hacks”). But what makes the show distinctive is its exploration of a broader, more topical theme: the collapse of the power of bosses in prestige industries.
Not long ago, it seemed as if everyone wanted to be the head of a Condé Nast magazine, a major book publishing house or a studio. Now whether the editor of Vanity Fair is a good job is an open question. Tech oligarchs have the most swagger in the culture, and social media has diminished the marketing muscle of publishers and studios. While managing the decline of traditional media is a challenge for the movie business, it’s an opportunity for satirists.
Rogen and his longtime partner, Evan Goldberg, who are among the creators of “The Studio,” locate and exploit this cultural shift, giving comedy a new kind of corporate suit. Their insight is that the Hollywood mogul, long seen as an intimidating, cigar-chomping heavy, can now credibly be positioned as a comedic underdog — or even a likable buffoon.
This is more of a feat than it sounds. Hating the boss is a venerable tradition, and making us care about the troubles of a guy killing a dream project of Martin Scorsese, as “The Studio” tries to do, is not easy. Rogen’s Remick is a well-intentioned if ineffectual movie lover, continually forced into compromises by a rapidly changing business he struggles to keep up with.
Every episode shows us Remick hoping for validation that never comes. He repeatedly suffers abject humiliation while navigating hot-button issues of the moment, including the use of artificial intelligence in movies, the racial politics of casting and streaming’s threat to the theatrical experience. Rogen’s awkward chuckle has never been put to better use.
The Golden Globes episode begins with Remick on the phone in a limousine trying to explain to his mother that even if his movie wins an award, the studio head doesn’t get to make an acceptance speech. She says that they better give him credit considering his sacrifices, adding the jab that he doesn’t have a child or a wife. Exiting the car, he faces all the familiar elements of Hollywood glamour: flashing cameras, expensive tuxedos and dresses, beautiful people. But Remick can’t enjoy it. Rogen keeps putting on a confident front that contrasts sharply with his subtext, feeling irrelevant, ignored, unknown. One could look at this privileged man and see parts of the pettiest resentments of our current elite.
Even while mocking Remick, “The Studio” invites us to take his feelings seriously. It shows us how hampered a Hollywood honcho is these days, undercut by stars and filmmakers who have more power to promote themselves than ever before and by the forever looming prospect of the company being bought by a tech giant.
No director wants Remick on set. No artist wants to hear his notes. Pity the poor mogul. Imagine, the show asks us, spending your whole life trying and succeeding at becoming Louis B. Mayer, only to discover you’re more like Michael Scott. That could make you come undone.
Remick certainly does in an earlier episode at a fund-raiser with a group of pediatric oncologists who condescend to him when he demands they concede that making movies is as important as treating children with cancer. His primary goal at the Globes is an increasingly unhinged attempt to get Zoë Kravitz, who directed a nominated movie that he greenlit, to agree to thank him in an acceptance speech.
One of many stars playing themselves, including Adam Scott, Quinta Brunson and Aaron Sorkin, Kravitz is superb as a familiar trope, the actor downplaying awards while carefully plotting her winning campaign, which does not include mentioning Remick.
The truth is that wanting to get thanked in an awards show isn’t entirely silly. Credit in Hollywood matters. It has broken up friendships and made careers.
One of the sharpest subplots of the episode involves Remick’s jealousy of the Netflix chief executive Ted Sarandos, who gets thanks in every star’s acceptance speech, driving Remick to distraction. Whereas Remick badly wants to be considered part of the process of making great art, Sarandos sees posing as an artist as counterproductive. He’s all business. To get everyone to thank him, Sarandos doesn’t waste time ingratiating himself. He puts it in their contracts.
The show occasionally has a scabrous bite, as when the comedian Ramy Youssef, playing the host of the Globes, compliments Kravitz’s movie backstage. “It’s really good,” he tells her, before clarifying. “Not just diversity good.”
Yet those expecting “The Studio” to be as cynical as “The Larry Sanders Show” will be disappointed. It is the kind of industry satire that the industry could cozy up to, even during awards season. The first evidence of its sentimental streak is its swooping, gorgeously cinematic camerawork. It tells you that the aim here is not gritty warts-and-all realism. The show’s script pokes fun at Remick’s dreams, but its look buys into them. That tension is part of the fun.
You can tell that Rogen reveres the same image of Hollywood that his character does. He also clearly sympathizes with wanting movies to really matter, to feel important. What award shows do best, after all, is keep that idea circulating, even when the case gets hard to make.
By the end of the episode, the thought may cross your mind that the Golden Globes red carpet does stand for something. Even if it never did, it’s in the grand tradition of show business to be nostalgic for something that didn’t exist.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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