The Studio
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The cast of Apple TV's very funny new satire, The Studio, starts with Seth Rogen. He plays a Hollywood studio head desperately trying to do a job he's afraid of failing at every single day. But that cast list goes on and on. There are comedy MVPs like Catherine O'Hara and Bryan Cranston, but also cameos from actors and directors playing themselves, including Anthony Mackie, Zoe Kravitz, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, and more.

Ice Cube. Oh, yeah. And that is only the beginning. I'm Ayesha Harris. And I'm Linda Holmes. And today we are talking about the studio on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. This is a fun one.

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This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in prison for a murder she did not commit. When she was exonerated, she made an unusual decision to befriend the prosecutor who argued for her guilt. Maybe he could help her make sense of her case. I spent years thinking about it and trying to understand it until I realized that I could just ask. Listen to this interview on the Fresh Air podcast.

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Over 70% of us say that we feel spiritual, but that doesn't mean we're going to church. Nope. The girls are doing Reiki. The bros are doing psychedelics. And a whole lot of us are turning inward to manifest our best selves. On It's Been a Minute from NPR, I'm looking at why maybe you and your closest friends are buying into wellness for spirituality. That's on the It's Been a Minute podcast from NPR.

Joining us today is our Pop Culture Happy Hour co-host, Glenn Weldon. Hello, Glenn. Hey, Linda. And also with us is Daisy Rosario. She's the Senior Supervising Producer of Audio at Slate, where she works with great shows like Death, Sex, and Money and I See Why Am I. Welcome back, Daisy. Oh, thanks.

Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here. It's always great to see you. So in the studio, Seth Rogen plays Matt Remick, who becomes the head of Continental Studios after his top boss, played by Bryan Cranston, fires his mentor, Patty, played by Catherine O'Hara. Soon,

Soon, Matt is trying to run the place with the help of his old friend and right-hand Sal, played by Ike Barinholtz. Also, you can't have a studio without marketing. Heading up that department is Katherine Hahn as Maya, a ruthless and calculating operator who always has her eyes on the box office. Like, for instance, when they're planning a big tentpole movie about Kool-Aid. ♪

You want to make a fancy Kool-Aid movie? Why? Why? Nobody even watches the Oscars anymore. Did Mario Brothers win an Oscar? Nope, it did not. No, it didn't. But you know what it did win?

$1.3 billion. We watch Matt oversee Continental's entire slate, which includes a Sarah Polly drama starring Greta Lee, a Ron Howard action picture with Anthony Mackie, and a gritty noir directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Zac Efron.

And all these people appear in the series as themselves, having anywhere between a light chuckle and a belly laugh at their own expense, and sometimes proving, as in the case of not just Ron Howard, who obviously we know is a comic actor, but also Martin Scorsese, that they are very funny in their own right. That's the phrase. They drank the Kool-Aid, drink the Kool-Aid, whatever it is. That's the phrase. That's the climax of the picture. It's a big, big sequence. That's great. In a sense, I guess...

You could say that your film is about Kool-Aid.

Very funny, that Martin Scorsese. The series spans everything from the Golden Globes to a missing reel of film to, naturally, Vegas. And it's streaming on Apple TV. I'm going to start with you, Aisha. How did the studio work for you? Look, I'm not going to sit here and say that everything that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg touch turns to gold because I watched a few episodes of that Sausage Party series that they came out with. And my God, that was horrific. But I'm going to start with you, Aisha.

But since Freaks and Geeks, there's pretty much been a pretty high chance that I was going to love something that Seth Rogen was either directly or indirectly involved in. So I'm predisposed to like this show. And my God, I like this show. I love it. In the realm of Hollywood insider programming, I feel like this show exists somewhere between like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and an Oscars telecast. Like Curb, it's very crude, blunt, very self-aware about the industry's

trappings and the hypocrisy and all the weirdos, but it still maintains the Oscars underlying message that the art of making movies and entertaining people means something. And I like that tension. I like that balance. And as the show goes on, you see the push and pull of, you know, the Seth Rogen character and his like,

concerned about art versus commerce and all these other things. So I loved this. I had some small quibbles, but overall, this was just very fun and very much up my alley. I really dug it too. And that kind of surprised me for some of the reasons that Aisha mentioned. I am here to represent that cohort of listeners who were thinking of giving this a miss, but what sets it apart and surprises no one more than me is Seth Rogen, who has decided here that

that if he just did his usual schtick, his usual on-screen persona and nothing more, that kind of goofy, amiable, regular guy who is probably a stoner, it wouldn't work here because this thing needs emotional stakes. And that's something that that persona can't really, it doesn't really have the capacity to soak up. So he digs in here and he creates a real character with a single perfect tone.

tragic flaw. He's a guy racked with, driven by this need to be loved, to be respected, to be considered cool. And the minute you want to be cool, you will never be cool. That's what the show understands. So instead of just Rogan being Rogan, and instead of just another Hollywood satire where, you know, directors and actors are invited to kind of come into the sandbox and play around in that kind of knowing way, which renders it, I mean,

pretty safe, the satire. I think what we get in each episode is a cautionary tale, a morality play, Greek tragedy, basically, to go back to that flaw. And, you know, we haven't mentioned the C word, but that's also incurred. Cringe. There's certainly some cringe here in the mix. So much. So much. Plus, as you mentioned, Catherine O'Hara and Catherine Hahn are

What am I, made of stone? Middle-aged comedy queer. And that's my cheat code. So yeah, I'm in. Totally in on this show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Daisy, how about you? I agree with everyone's descriptions so far. I'm a huge Seth Rogen fan in general. Like, just have always appreciated the stuff that he's done and what he's done.

kind of kept his own focus on like throughout his work, right? Like he just really seems to make stuff that he genuinely likes. And that honestly feels increasingly rare in general. The execution of the show I think is really well done. Like, oh my goodness, like the cameos. Like I knew that there were a lot of cameos. I didn't look up any specific

beforehand. So it was really fun to be watching it with my wife. And there's a scene where, you know, he goes to knock on a door and like literally my wife's like, who's this going to be? And then we both were like, oh man, that's such a great person. Like, so it had all of that. Right. But for me personally, man,

man, I found it hard to watch. I don't know that I could have gotten past the second episode. I actually didn't feel this way for the first episode, but particularly once you get into the second episode and they're like in these situations for me personally, it hit really close to home. Like I've been a creative executive. I am a producer by trade in general. Like I've worked on a bunch of different stuff and I,

I don't know. I've always heard people tell me that like the bear is very stressful and I don't feel that when I'm watching it because I think it's probably too close to like family stuff, which you think would stress me out. But my, it's almost like my nervous system understands the wavelength watching this. My nervous system was like, ping, ping, ping, like save yourself, get out of here. I was stressed, but I do want to be clear that I think it seems really good, even though I don't think I could have, um,

Yeah. I get that. Yeah, I, boy, I really liked this too. And I have really become a fan of some of the stuff that Seth Rogen is doing in his kind of middle age, if we can say it that way. Yeah. I really liked Platonic, which he made with Rose Byrne, also for Apple. Yes.

Which Nick Stoller was one of the creators of that. You see quite a bit of Nick Stoller in this series. He also plays himself. I know what he looks like now. I had no idea before. And there's a really interesting continuum between people who are cameos in the purest sense, right? They walk on and they walk off and that's basically all you get.

And people like Nick Stoller, like Anthony Mackie, like Ron Howard, who play a character who is a version of themselves. And we did a whole episode at one point about people playing themselves in this kind of setting.

And I think in just about every case, they do it exactly right because we had talked about, A, it needs to be funny. Yeah. You need to have a take. There needs to be an idea of who you are that's not just who you are. And so, for example, Daisy mentioned the second episode. And the second episode is about Matt going to the set where Sarah Polly is shooting a dramatic film starring Greta Lee, which like it.

makes sense, right? It sounds like a thing that would exist, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And that's true, I would argue, of all of the fake movie projects in this. They sound very close to things. But anyway, they are trying to shoot a very complicated one or one of these long shots without cuts that requires a lot of choreography. And they're trying to shoot it right at sunset, so they have very limited time. The only thing he wants is to go there and be cool and be liked and

And be supportive and be helpful. I want to be a good executive. And he can't do the only things she wants. And so she gets more and more frustrated. Sarah Polly does. Gets more and more frustrated with him.

And all he's trying to do is please her. And it's also, I think, that episode's such a good meditation on the way that people in this kind of job, like the job he now has, they learn that they can't believe anything that anybody says to them. Just as much as other people don't believe them when they say things because they're often lying. He realizes, like, oh...

They're lying when I give an idea and she's like, sure, great idea. He's coming to terms with the fact that now you are so separated from these people that you can't have a conversation with them because, A, they want too much from you, right? They want you to promote the movie. They want, in her case, more money for the music budget. And also they fear you. And so now you can't have...

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

which there aren't a lot of, we see that, as you say, Linda, he sees it too and he hates it. There's a moment in the second episode where Patty, the Catherine O'Hara character, and that tension is also very interesting because he's the one who replaced her. But now she is getting some sort of creative fulfillment out of her lower... She's an actual producer on movies. Right, right, right. And so she tells Matt at one point, she's like...

literally the only reason anyone wants to talk to you is because they want to get something from you. It kind of sinks in, but it takes like several episodes. And we see later on when he's at an award show and he's just so desperate to get attention and how that just blows up in his face. It's like, he still doesn't understand. Like this isn't how these things work. Like you just, you have to figure out how to fulfill yourself. And I think one of the other smart things about this show is that it is basically all about his work. Like,

we learned a little bit about his background. Like he has a date, but like it's always his personal life that is intersecting with his work and not his work intersecting with his personal life. And I liked that because there's a world where this could have been like, we're trying to balance, like he has a wife and kids and he's on set. No, he's single. He is thrust into this position he's always wanted. And now he's kind of hating it. And I love that. One of the

things that I really, really like about the way that they made this is I think it is in some ways more effectively cutting than some of the Hollywood satires that we have already mentioned while being less misanthropic. And the way they get there is they make it a study of how even people who are all individually

decent human beings who are driven by a genuine love of what they do are constantly lying, undermining each other, throwing fits, doing outrageous things. I mean, the basic structure of many, if not most of these episodes is a problem appears, Matt begins trying to solve it, and he makes it into a gradually bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger problem until it explodes in some

horrifying way. What I take away from this is that really the problem is once you create a system that is this messed up,

It cannot be corrected by the individual good intentions of people within it. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, Catherine O'Hara, as Aisha mentioned, is getting kind of more fulfillment now that she's not an executive because the job of the executive is a miserable job if you really love movies. And that is systemic, right?

And not individually a thing that you can solve. And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, the studio reminds me of The Wire. Because that is also the lesson of The Wire is individual good intentions do not fix completely broken systems. And that's what I like about it. I think it is like somehow more punishing toward executives and also more sympathetic to them.

And I don't know exactly how that is accomplished, but that is sort of how the show struck me. Yeah, I think that that kind of humanity is really a big part of what makes Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's work work the way it does. Right. Because Superbad, if they didn't have that actual like core friendship and those emotional ties to it.

then it's just 1,000 dick jokes in a movie, right? And sometimes I forget when I go back to rewatch it, but I go back to rewatch it for those dynamics and things that really work where there are so many other movies that can maybe have that many jokes in it, but that humanity part of it is not there, right? And so that helped make it a classic. And I think, yeah, they both keep that pretty core to the work that they do together. And I think, you know, it seems...

somewhat true of, you know, the little bit that we do know about Seth Rogen as a person, like if you read interviews with him and I think that he also feels really weird about that. Yeah. Is what I do important? Yeah.

but also it's such an all-encompassing world once you're in it. Like, you can't work deeply in Hollywood and not think that it's super important on some level. You just won't survive the day, right? Because that's just part of what you have to believe to be able to do a bunch of the stuff that you're doing. There's a line early on in the show that Seth Rogen has been mentioning in the interviews. And I got into all this because, you know, I love movies, but now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them.

And he says that's something that somebody really said to them. That somebody really said to him and that made him have more empathy for their role as well, right? And so, you know, Lord knows I've experienced that just in podcasting. Like, it's ridiculous. So, yeah, I think that part of it's very core for them as well. Yeah, it's interesting to me because this feels like such a time capsule of where Hollywood is in this moment in a way that I think we're going to look back on again.

and be like, this was really what it was like, or like, at least what we the public have think it is like. It's just fascinating to me the fact that like, there is a cameo from an actual executive that like, I'm struggling with, because you could argue that that person is responsible for most of what is happening in this show. I am going to be fascinated to see how people receive that scene, especially compared to how I think the person in it thinks it's

going to be received. Exactly. Exactly. That is the one cameo where I was just like, I don't know about this. That's the issue, right? It's like, it's this moment where the show frequently references Barbenheimer. Like this is, we are in a moment where like people are trying to duplicate this. That makes the Kool-Aid joke even funnier. Like this long gestating Kool-Aid joke that continues. But it's also just like, man, this is kind of, kind of sad. And I do wonder if like

this will feel in the same way that something like, I don't know, Sunset Boulevard. And I'm not saying that they're at all on the same part, but what I'm saying is that, like, we look at a movie like Sunset Boulevard or any movie that kind of, like, really captures what Hollywood was feeling in that moment. I feel like this show does that in a way. Like, the anxieties around TV and streaming and all of those things are really, really just brought to the forefront here. I do want to talk about some of these performances. I will say, like, I...

have been for a long time a person who has felt that a little bit of Ike Barinholtz goes a long way. That is how I felt when he was on The Mindy Project. That is how I have felt in some other things. I think he's very good in this. Catherine O'Hara here is actually playing a little bit smaller than she sometimes has. It's not small. It's not small. No.

And I love Catherine O'Hara big. I have a Moira Rose mug. It's not that. But I like the fact that there's a little bit more of a chance for a more kind of authentic seeming. I don't want to say Moira Rose wasn't authentic for a more kind of low key emotion to come out. The job is a meat grinder. Makes you stressed and panicked and miserable. One week you're looking, you're idle in the eye and breaking his heart.

And the next week you're writing a blank check for some entitled nipple baby in a beanie. While Bryan Cranston has not been playing this crazy for a while, he plays a role in the sort of there is inevitably a sequence that involves everybody and drugs and debauchery. To me,

That is never the stuff that turns me on the most. I am a longstanding like drunk people are only funny if you're also drunk kind of person. However, this is as close as you're going to get to making me like it because it's funny. And Bryan Cranston plays a role in that. And does he go for it?

He really does. There's also just like a lot of great banter, including a moment when the Catherine Han character is describing Steve Buscemi. And she nails exactly what his public persona is like in just the most perfect way. Stephen Buscemi is absolutely the worst case scenario.

Either people know his name, but they can't recognize his face, or they know his face, but they have no idea what his name is. He is not good for minutes. She's the devil on his shoulder. Yes, she is the devil. She is pushing him to do all the bad stuff. And props to her costumer as well, because that...

The fits, the LV bag, the LV everything. That's a choice. Cranston is going real big in that first episode. You think he can't go bigger than you see subsequent episodes, and he in fact does. And I was worried about that episode, Linda, because, you know, I know you, and I know you do not react well to drug scenes and drug storylines. It worked for me because there was a ticking clock in that scenario. There's stakes. There's danger. I think if it was just people getting high and

I agree with you, but I think it's in service of something. Very funny, very funny something, but something anyway. To its credit, it comes out of, again, Matt's fatal flaw of wanting to be cool. And the reason why they all get so high, it's just like, dude, you

You're such a nerd. Yeah, because there's also a lot of technical skill on display, too. All those single-camera takes, which gives it – I mean, there's a lot of them, but they're used effectively. There's a fluidity and a dynamic quality. It brushes up against mannered in some places. You're almost getting more condiment than meat, but it always pulls back at just the right moment. I think it's fully in control of what it's doing. Yeah, this one was a kick. I very much enjoyed it. I really hope people are going to find it. Apple has had a heck of a time getting people to find it.

most of their shows with a couple of major exceptions. Give it a shot. You know, it's probably not going to be as triggering for you as it is for Daisy. It really probably won't be. Like, honestly, in one of the interviews I read, one of the things that Seth Rogen was saying was that it's set in Hollywood. It's, you know, this life that not everybody experiences, but he wanted the dynamics of like,

The boss that is making choices from a place of insecurity and it's impacting other people and all of that stuff to really resonate. And I think, yeah, if you're not as easily triggered as me, if you have not had to move celebrities around and famous, powerful people around when the sun is going down and you have only a few minutes to do something, I think you can also enjoy this.

Absolutely. 100%. Well, we do want to know what you think about the studio. Find us at facebook.com slash PCHH. That brings us to the end of our show. Daisy Rosario, Aisha Harris, Glenn Weldon, thank you so much for being here. I would hire any of you to be in my movie. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. Thank you. And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio. And you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor-free.

So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash happy hour or visit the link in our show notes. This episode is produced by Hafsa Fatma and Lennon Sherburn and edited by Mike Katzeff. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we will see you all tomorrow.

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Well, well, well, the bros have discovered psychedelics. And guys like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk have been bragging about their spirit journeys for years. Academy is helpful for getting one out of a negative frame of mind. If psychedelics are being championed as the next frontier for mental health, what impact are they already having on some of the world's most powerful men? Prepare for your mind to be blown on the It's Been a Minute podcast from NPR.