Hollywood loves a story about itself — Seth Rogen racks up Emmy nods for ‘The Studio’

The Studio is a TV satire of Hollywood that has become a darling of the TV and film industry; it stars Seth Rogen as an earnest but frantic head of a legacy movie studio. With 23 Emmy Award nominations, the Apple TV+ series broke records for a comedy in its first season. The show already picked up nine awards at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys.

“Part of the idea of the show was really to immerse the audience in the glamorous world of Hollywood,” Rogen told NPR, “to really show what it’s like to go to the Beverly Hilton and go to the Golden Globes and a party at one of the Chateau Marmont penthouses.”

Rogen was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, for his role as the desperate new chief of the fictitious Continental Studios, who manages to muck up his productions. Among the show’s cast are Catheryn O’Hara, whose character is the aggrieved, pushed-aside former studio head; Kathryn Hahn, who plays the over-the-top, loudmouthed head of marketing; and Ike Barinholtz, who portrays studio sycophant Sal Saperstein, whose shoutouts are a running joke at a Golden Globes ceremony. Both Hahn and Barinholtz were nominated in the Emmys outstanding supporting acting categories.

The series also features a number of A-listers whose performances earned them nominations in the same category, Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series: actor Bryan Cranston picked up that award at the Creative Arts Emmys. But also nominated for their appearances were actors Dave Franco and Anthony Mackie, as well as directors Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese. They all play along (as themselves) while the series lampoons the fragile egos, the pettiness and the excesses of some celebrities and those climbing the industry ladder.

The show has already earned Creative Arts Emmys for its costumes, production design, casting, picture editing, sound editing, sound mixing, music supervision and cinematography.

“People in Hollywood seem to really like it. The executives are all very uncomfortable with how much it reflects their real life,” says Rogen, who adds that the characters are generally based on ‘all of them.’ “We always thought people within Hollywood would dig it, and if they didn’t, we really blew it,” he says.

Rogen has been collaborating with his creative partner Evan Goldberg since they were teens who met at bar mitzvah classes in Vancouver. They were both writers for Da Ali G Show in 2004 before finishing their screenplay of Superbad, the 2007 comedy that put them on the map. They also collaborated on comedies such as Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, This is the End, and Platonic. With the production company they cofounded, Point Grey Pictures, Rogen and Goldberg also wrote and produced the animated features Sausage Party and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. They also own a Canadian cannabis company, but that’s another story.

For years, co-creator and co-executive producer Goldberg says they also were thinking about funny approaches to show the ways in which Hollywood is morphing. While picketing against the major studios during the double writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023, they developed some ideas, and when the strikes ended, they started writing The Studio.

“We became obsessed and excited with the idea of celebrating Los Angeles as the home of Hollywood in this time, especially when a lot of productions are going other places,” Goldberg tells NPR. That included showing off what he calls L.A.’s “weird” architecture and the “odd artistic flair” of its many neighborhoods. “[We’re] mostly really embracing these incredibly beautiful, elegant, interesting places where we’re having incredibly stupid, intense conversations about movies with high stakes.”

The Studio also follows the current zeitgeist of today’s film industry, as tech companies and advertisers try to gain creative control. Rogen says a lot of people like to engage in deep philosophical conversations about the state of the industry. But he says decision-making in Hollywood is all about “risk mitigation.”

“It usually comes down to someone didn’t want their boss to be mad at them,” Rogen says.

The series parodies decisions made in the wake of the successful Barbie movie, with Continental Studios glomming on to an intellectual property (or as they say in Hollywood, “i.p.”), in hopes of generating box office gold. Rogen’s character Matt Remick is a cinephile who submits to his corporate bosses; Instead of greenlighting a drama by auteur Scorsese about the Jonestown massacre, he gives the thumbs up to a movie based on the i.p. of Kool Aid.

“I got into all this because I love movies,” Remick frets at one point. “But now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them.”