Whatever you want to call the current age of television, it is far from golden and far from the prestige era of the late aughts. Instead we have entered into some sort of silver age, where television has all the qualitative earmarks of the prestige era—fancy, though digitally glossy, cinematography, showy directing, big stars, elaborate stage production—but with the kind of story churn and writing that more resembles the kind of television I grew up on.
I'd compare present-day TV to the cable dramas of the late 2000s. Shows like the 911 series, Defector favorite Reacher, The Pitt, or the Taylor Sheridan and Tyler Perry television universes hearken back to familiar TV tropes of the 2000s, but with bigger names and often more elaborate filmmaking. I find this mostly refreshing. At the peak of the prestige era, it felt like television had forgotten something fundamental about its medium that separates it from movies—you spend more time with these characters and therefore they become members of your family, and you want to care about their stories and not just try and solve some overarching mystery the entire time. For every True Detective or Twin Peaks: The Return, there were a lot more Westworlds and Black Mirrors, shows that tend to fall apart when you're no longer invested in solving their puzzles. TV should still be a little boilerplate, and should be more about characters than the story.
It is in this new television reality that I watched The Studio, the latest splashy Apple series, created by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The series follows Matt Remick (Rogen), the new head of (imaginary, definitely-not-a-fictionalized-Sony) Continental Studios, as he tries to match his deep love of movies and filmmakers with his desperate ambition, greed, and need to feel liked by filmmakers and to be part of the creative process. Robert Altman's The Player meets The Larry Sanders Show. It's a send-up of Hollywood that allows Rogen and Goldberg to exorcise some demons, skewer some execs, maybe work through some unresolved feelings about that 2014 Sony hack, and get all their famous friends to hang out, Extras style. (Listen, we're in a recession and everyone needs a little help.) It's obviously well-worn territory, but that's fine. That's what television is for. It's also part of what The Studio is playing with, a parody of the business of Hollywood made by Hollywood filmmakers for television. This would've just been a movie 20 years ago, but there's no money in movies like this nowadays, so TV it is. At least after the two episodes I've seen, the story works well in this medium. It's not trying to be more than what it is, there is no deeper signifying like The Sopranos or Mad Men, and there is no high drama or mystery box. It's a funny drama for actors of all kinds to get some shots up.
The first episode follows Remick's rise to head of Continental Studios. The studio's new CEO, Bryan Cranson's Griffin Mill (The Player reference), greenlights the promotion, but with the understanding that Remick will fast-track Mill's idea of establishing a Kool-Aid movie. In an effort to bring some Barbie-style artistic credibility to what otherwise might be a brainless IP adaptation, he decides court a name-brand auteur to make the movie, looking to prove that art and profit can co-exist. This eventually leads to a meeting with Martin Scorsese (playing himself) about his Jonestown Massacre script, which Remick agrees to buy so long as they can call the movie Kool-Aid. It's all typical comedy of errors stuff that ends up blowing up in their faces. Catherine O'Hara has a lot of fun in her role as the ousted former studio head, which may or may not be an allusion to Amy Pascal. Kathryn Hahn does a lot of Kathryn Hahn stuff, which is always welcome. And Ike Barinholtz plays the most effective foil to Rogen as his friend and fellow executive. As for the guest stars, Scorsese is great, and Sarah Polley and Greta Lee do some really good work in the second episode, but there's always a risk to relying too much on cameos. The celebrities-skewering-themselves trick is so overdone that it's close to hacky at this point, and I don't know that a Seth Rogen series is going to suddenly fix that issue.
But again, it's TV, that's kinda what we're here for: a fun time, some interesting characters, and an engaging story to distract us from the outside world. The current silver age hasn't shed all the vestiges of the prestige era, which still can be seen in shows like The White Lotus and Severance, ones that aren't boring or slow necessarily but have almost adopted boredom as an aesthetic quality, slowly burning through mystery and mood, to the point where people online have to invent more meaning out of every frame than is actually there. That still has its place in TV, and people certainly don't seem to mind the languid pacing—apparently lots of people enjoyed themselves on Wednesday while staring at chairs with actors' names on them—so perhaps we're in a great time for slow television. But personally, I am enjoying TV that gets back to basics.
