EMMYS WATCH 2025 — The Studio: Television (About Movies), Now More Than Ever
/‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.
In the new comedy series The Studio, we follow Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), the new in-over-his-head Head of Continental Studios, working alongside best friend and VP of Production Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), as well as creative executive and Matt’s former assistant Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders), ousted studio head Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara), and the studio’s foul-mouthed head of marketing Maya Mason (Kathryn Hahn) in their quest to make original, artistic films at the studio level. The Studio is a successor to other showbiz satires such as Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen 1991), Bowfinger (Frank Oz 1999) and most notably, The Player (Robert Altman 1992) and provides a close, comedic look at the machinations of modern filmmaking.
Fig. 1: “I’m sort of single-handedly keeping film alive.” – Matt Remick in “The Missing Reel,” Episode 4
Matt Remick is an avowed cinephile, earnestly attempting to make great movies that connect with audiences while dodging Continental Studios CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston, in an homage to Tim Robbins’ character of the same name in The Player), communicating with unruly filmmakers, actors, and writers, and eluding the encroaching threat of the studio’s sale to Amazon. As much as the series satirizes the players’ grasping for creative power in the film industry, The Studio is often quite sentimental regarding the filmmaking process and has a sincere affection for the people who make movie magic. As Patty reassures Matt, “The job is a meat grinder. It makes you stressed and panicked and miserable. One week you’re looking your idol in the eye and breaking his heart, and the next week you’re writing a blank check for some entitled nepo baby in a beanie. But when it all comes together, and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.”
Created by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez, The Studio is part of a surge in showbiz satire on streaming television this Emmys season, growing a self-reflexive subgenre in which the industry “constantly speaks to itself about itself” (Caldwell 2008, 35) The series joins fellow Outstanding Comedy Series nominees Hacks, last year’s winner that follows the odd coupling of a young comedy writer and a legendary late-night comedienne, and the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building, which sees the trio of New York City podcasters-turned-detectives solving a murder while their podcast is adapted to the big screen. The Studio earned 23 Emmy Nominations this year, tying fellow Apple TV+ comedy Ted Lasso for the most nominations for a comedy series in the history of the Television Academy’s awards.
Over the course of its first season, The Studio takes us inside Hollywood studio filmmaking through the anxious antics of Matt and his ragtag Continental Studio colleagues. Each episode chronicles the minutiae of the pre-to-post production process, from Remick’s delivery of a studio note to director Ron Howard, a debate over the colorblind casting of the Kool-Aid Movie, to a thank you speech at the Golden Globe Awards. The pleasures of The Studio lie in the multitude of industry in-jokes and situational comedy, kicking off hilariously with an uncomfortable encounter between the studio executives and Martin Scorsese where Matt must kill the award-winning filmmaker’s proposed Jonestown/Kool-Aid project. Other memorable incidents include Olivia Wilde causing problems as she goes “full Fincher” mode on the set of her directorial effort, Matt’s insecurity over Ted Sarandos getting thanked over him at the Golden Globes, and the looming presence of Puck newsletter founder and The Ringer podcaster Matt Belloni. The Studio engages in what media industry studies scholar John Thornton Caldwell (2008, 2) calls industrial reflexivity, where deep texts (such as a television show about the behind-the-scenes of moviemaking) circulate information about production cultures and function as a “form of local cultural negotiation and expression.” Hollywood is a highly self-reflexive industry, constantly producing film and television about what it takes to make film and television, and often engaging in self-critique and reflection on the labor conditions within production cultures. The Studio playfully criticizes the commercial forces that intrude on studio workers, with Remick and his team standing in for a broader creative community dealing with corporate intrusions on media production in a tech-driven, conglomerate Hollywood.
Fig. 2: (Left to Right) Sarah Polley, Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara) and Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) on set of “The Oner,” Episode 2
The series frequently employs the “oner,” a technique used famously in the first 8 minutes of The Player where we follow studio employees literally behind-the-scenes as they walk and talk their way through studio offices and film sets in a single, unbroken tracking shot. In the second episode, “The Oner,” Matt and Sal visit Oscar-winning filmmaker Sarah Polley on the set of her new film as she shoots a oner through the set of her new romantic drama (Fig. 2). Purposefully, the episode itself was shot in one continuous take by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra. Discussing the prep process for oners with Variety, Newport-Berra said, “we would go to these locations and walk through it with an iPhone, the script, and just see how it timed out” and “often we’d have to figure out how to blend two locations, or how we would get out of one scene and into another” (Tangcay 2025). Shooting oners was all about “capturing the energy” of Altman’s one-shot in The Player, but in their own way, according to Newport-Berra (Tangcay 2025). While Altman’s formal choices make us feel as if we are spying on the seedy, greedy underbelly of Hollywood in its oner, The Studio operates in a lighter comedy verité style, where frantic, handheld cameras and a mockumentary aesthetic construct the show’s situational humor, as opposed to the canned jokes found in traditional network sitcoms (Mills 2004; Thompson 2007). Importantly, comedy verité is not a genre but a mode utilized to account for ballooning studio budgets and to make a distinction between the classical sitcom aesthetic and the visual and narrative complexity of the post-network era. The Studio’s “television show about movies” premise, cinematic flourishes, and a subplot about the studio’s sale to a streaming tech company all offer sly metacommentary on contemporary “prestige” television production and the film-ification of the medium of television.
After the series’ launch on Apple TV+ in March, a couple of projects were announced in the trade press that prove we really are living in the world of The Studio. The first is Hershey, a biopic-drama starring Alexandra Daddario and Finn Wittrock about the Pennsylvania chocolate company (Shanfeld 2025). The second project, announced with cosmic timing just a month after the premiere episode of The Studio, is a Jonestown television series co-written by and likely starring Bill Hader as Jim Jones (and not Steve Buscemi as pitched by Matt to Martin Scorsese) (Otterson 2025). If you visit a trade press website, in all likelihood you are bound to find that your favorite childhood toy or character is getting the silver-screen treatment. However, despite every new studio film sounding like it’s based on IP, a true story, and driven by algorithms and viral marketing, The Studio ultimately shows us that the frenzied and earnest team efforts in working to make something great under such conditions may, in fact, keep film alive.
References
Caldwell, John Thornton. 2008. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Duke University Press.
Mills, Brett. 2004. “Comedy Verité: Contemporary Sitcom Form.” Screen 45 (1): 63-78. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/45.1.63
Otterson, Joe. 2025. “Bill Hader to Co-Write, Potentially Star in Jonestown Series in Development at HBO (EXCLUSIVE).” Variety, April 23. https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/bill-hader-jonestown-series-hbo-daniel-zelman-1236376109/
Shanfeld, Ethan. 2023. “Hershey Chocolate Movie Set with ‘Mean Girls’ Director, Finn Wittrock and Alexandra Daddario to Star (EXCLUSIVE).” Variety, April 25. https://variety.com/2025/film/news/hershey-chocolate-movie-alexandra-daddario-finn-wittrock-1236362628/
Tangcay, Jazz. 2025. “How ‘The Studio’ Pulled Off Its One-Take Episode: Weeks of Planning, Dozens of Takes and Lots of Flubbed Lines.” Variety, March 27. https://variety.com/2025/artisans/news/the-studio-one-take-episode-1236347408/
Thompson, Ethan. 2007. "Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom." The Velvet Light Trap 60: 63-72. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vlt.2007.0027.
Biography
Madison Barnes-Nelson is a PhD candidate in Communication Arts (Media and Cultural Studies) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently working on a dissertation about how audiences make meaning out of comedy television, film, and digital media.