Happy for Seth Rogen but The Studio is a little too accurate to enjoy as a satire

Unlike Adolescence, I think most people have watched The Studio – if it sounds like the kind of show that’s your thing, it’s hard to have avoided it – and why would you? Stellar cast, madcap-caper style storytelling, a big love for cinema, and affection for cinephiles – of course it won a bunch of Emmys. Of course Seth Rogen – along with his longtime producing/directing partner Evan Goldberg, whose name wasn’t even announced by Parker Posey and Walton Goggins for their shared directing win – is a charming delight that everyone wants to see succeed!

And yet.

I cannot with this show. And it’s killing me.

I love everyone on it, I think Rogen is immensely talented and has been waiting his whole life to tell the kinds of stories that require a guy in his 40s – I’m even sanguine about the bold-faced names playing themselves in various states of self-conscious sweatiness.

But here is the thing. Something with this show has gone horribly wrong.

Because when I started watching, and Rogen’s studio head Remnick started screwing up, and hesitating on giving notes, or giving too many, or being too delighted to be on set, or too reverent about film… I was ready. We’re gonna make fun of cinema dorks! Yeah, woo!

…but there is no making fun. Matt Remnick is, inexplicably, a hero – an earnest guy who fails upwards, gets romantic about stories but also delusional about the process, who wants to be popular but is actively the guy everyone works around… and it’s supposed to be a comedy.

But in actuality, The Studio is a documentary.

These people exist, and they proliferate, and even as they wreak disaster in their wake, they smile and chirp and somehow want everyone to marvel at the magic of celluloid. I have a colleague who refers to this type of person as ‘Jere’, regardless of their name, job, or gender. They’re all referred to by the same name because they’re the same no matter how much they try to be distinct: They arrive on set hours after work has begun, Golden Retriever themselves right up front beside the director, make far too much time to talk to performers, then, cite ‘so much work to do’ and retreat within an hour or so, Jere-ing all the way.

Yet Rogen’s studio head Remnick lives to see another day! I have to wonder if he (and Goldberg) expected a different reception, or if they’re aware they’re making a cuddly, likeable version of the character everyone on every type of set has learned to be wary of. Part of the problem is that the cast looks like they’re having so much fun together – all of them, but especially Remnick and Saperstein – that you can’t really curl your lip at Matt the way you’re kinda, sorta supposed to. Am I alone here?

I take a little solace in the fact that Rogen’s making a TV show about movie people – since he was very much in that world but seems to be creating more in the TV space (let me cry out here, yet again, for more people to watch the criminally underacknowledged Platonic – it’s a simpler show by far but Will is the role Rogen inhabits most naturally, possibly of any in his career), but that’s just me fooling myself – there are Jeres in every corner of this business… but it means that, like hospital workers who find The Pitt too much like work to decompress from work, The Studio is a little too accurate to enjoy as a satire.

It doesn’t help that everyone looks like they’re having all kinds of fun 100% of the time, especially but not exclusively Ike Barinholtz and Kathryn Hahn turning it up to 11. Happy for Rogen and team though, especially since he’s adorably sincere about the people he works with:

Also, Rogen in his enjoying fashion era is amazing – but paired with his wife Lauren Miller in my favourite tangerine? Please. It’s impossible even to grump about them, which is the worst.