OPINION: Apple TV+ is one of the best streaming services that you’re probably not watching. It’s not aiming to be Netflix or Prime Video in its approach, putting quality ahead of quantity, and after six years of existence there’s plenty to watch on the service.
If you’ve been paying any attention to streaming, you’d have noticed that The Studio – starring Seth Rogen – has racked up plenty of acclaim and attention, enough to score a second season. Empire described it as “triumphantly funny”. Rolling Stone called it “hilarious”.
I’ve found it mostly underwhelming.
Humour is not that subjective
Now some people will say “humour is subjective” but as I’ve grown older (and older), I’ve found that’s not something I agree with. Funny is funny and you’ll know it as soon as you hear or see it. And Apple TV+’s The Studio is not really that funny or as clever as it thinks it is.
It is the peak Apple TV+ show – full of guest stars in the same way that Apple product events and adverts tend to throw a famous person into the frame. But I don’t find much substance beneath that glossy surface, and after each episode I find myself wondering what exactly I’m not getting about this show that other people are.
What am I not getting?
There are a few things that bubble up to the surface when I’m watching The Studio. One is the feeling that every episode is filled with events where people are just shouting at each other for almost the entire run-time.
The conversations come across as high-strung, antagonistic – which I understand considering the pressure-cooker environment of Hollywood – but maybe not do the same thing for virtually every episode where people end up shouting at each other. It’s not clever, and it’s not funny. It actually becomes tiring after a while.
The jazzy music score became repetitive during the first episode, and aside from the film noir tones of episode four, it’s been the same drum/cymbal crash approach for every episode to the point where it becomes wallpaper of noise.
The long takes have become the signature style of the series but I find them very unimaginative – even the episode about “the oner” (a long shot with no cuts) felt as if it was both on the nose and too clever. From a technical point of view it’s impressive, but that’s not what you’re watching a comedy for is it.
And both the music and the long take approach remind me of Birdman, a film which I find to be so pretentious that it made me what to smack my head on the table. I massively enjoyed The Revenant which is by the same director and takes a similar approach to shooting, so maybe I’m talking absolute nonsense.
These characters would put me to sleep if they weren’t so loud
But most of all, I don’t find the characters engaging or interesting at all. They’re superficial and unlikable – which is not something that I find problematic – and you could make the argument that maybe they’re all warped and corrupted by Hollywood greed, but I find that they’re simply one note. I don’t need ‘growth’ in a character or necessarily need to them to be complex, but if you’re going to make unlikable and mostly ‘unredeemable’ characters, then it’d be fun to dislike them. This batch of characters are so boring.
It’s summed up in Seth Rogen’s studio head Matt Remick, who at the start of season seems to be a) smart and b) have ambitions of making smart blockbusters that make money without having to compromise in the first episode.
But then he seems to drop those ambitions, compromise his beliefs almost immediately and becomes a bumbling, anxiety-filled idiot – but you don’t really see that transition or that change come about. It’s as if the character you see in the episodes after the pilot is the real Matt Remick and the one in the first episode is the huckster and the impostor.
There are some smart moments from time to time but I’ve not found The Studio to be hilarious or really that insightful.
Everything it says is rather obvious, repetitive and delivered via the medium of people shouting or panicking. I’d love to enjoy it more than I am but honestly, you’d be better off watching (the much superior) Hacks instead of this glossy, somewhat dull series.
