Seth Rogen delivers basic, underwhelming showbiz satire with Apple TV+ series The Studio

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Seth Rogen's new Hollywood satire lacks punch.

Hollywood loves making fun of itself. Going back at least as far as 1928 silent film Show People, the movie (and later TV) business has used self-deprecation as a way to highlight its own shortcomings, often in order to anticipate and defuse genuine criticism. That's not to say that showbiz satires can't be incisive or unsparing, but the bar is set pretty high for a comedy to find some genuinely clever observations about the much-parodied movie business.

The new Apple TV+ series The Studio almost never clears that bar, although it delivers a handful of amusing moments over the course of its 10-episode first season. Created by frequent collaborators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg along with Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez, The Studio takes on the familiar subject matter of narcissistic celebrities, cynical executives and bloated corporate blockbusters without offering anything particularly new to the subgenre.

There's a glimmer of something promising at the beginning of the first episode, which starts in customary fashion with the apparent climactic shootout of a crime thriller, only to pull back to reveal that it's all taking place on a movie set. Matt Remick (Rogen), an executive at fictional Continental Studios, is there for a set visit, but no one pays attention to him, and the director doesn't even know his name. Matt is a genuine cinephile, attempting to chat up star Paul Dano about his underseen directorial debut Wildlife, but everyone just sees him as a corporate interloper.

The idea of a devoted film fan becoming the head of a major studio and using his clout to fight back against Hollywood mediocrity is intriguing, but The Studio quickly abandons that approach.

Before the first episode ends, Matt has already sold out. Not long after that embarrassing set visit, he learns that his longtime boss Patty Leigh (Catherine O'Hara) has been ousted, and he's offered the position of studio president. It's a dream come true for Matt, who envisions spearheading the kind of movies he grew up watching, but instead his first major project is a feature-film adaptation of Kool-Aid.

Watching Matt immediately abandon his principles is neither funny nor insightful, and he comes off as more of a bumbling idiot than either a cinema aficionado or a savvy businessman. It's hard to believe that Matt has been working at Continental for more than two decades, when he more often seems like a random fan who won a contest to run a studio. He's clueless both personally and professionally, making him something like the Michael Scott of studio executives, and The Studio is full of belabored cringe comedy.

The ruthless CEO who gives Matt his job is named Griffin Mill, after Tim Robbins' character in Robert Altman's brilliant 1992 Hollywood takedown The Player, but The Studio has almost nothing in common with Altman's classic film, and Mill (Bryan Cranston) bears no resemblance to Robbins' conflicted executive. Altman likewise packed his film with celebrity cameos, but there was a darkness that's completely absent in the lighthearted, lightweight The Studio.

Although he makes occasional missteps, Matt has a generally positive working relationship with his team, including his best friend Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz) and his former assistant Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders), who's been promoted to creative executive. Even Patty rejoins the team as an independent producer, offering Matt guidance drawn from her many years of experience.

Rogen and Goldberg direct every episode, in a style that utilizes elaborate long takes and a jittery, percussive score, both emulating another behind-the-scenes saga, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Oscar-winning Birdman. As pretentious and annoying as that movie may be, it deals with some serious themes about the nature of art, whereas the main theme of The Studio seems to be that Rogen knows a lot of famous people. Rogen and Goldberg's take on their industry is as basic as Matt's cinephilia, which doesn't extend to anything more obscure than Goodfellas.

The characters barely have personal lives, and Rogen and Goldberg sideline any potential emotional arcs in favor of a flood of celebrity cameos that quickly become meaningless. Almost none of the famous faces who show up on The Studio offer any tweaks on their established personas, existing primarily as placeholders to indicate that Continental's films are high-profile and expensive.

Matt quietly scoffs when someone from outside the industry suggests that he must have been a devoted viewer of Entourage, but in its own way The Studio is just as superficial as that bro-tastic hit. At least Entourage offered characters that viewers could bond with — The Studio is just one long, not particularly funny smirk at the very business it's propping up.