If you’ve ever been within a five-mile radius of a film set, you definitely know the studio executive. They are the human equivalent of that one friend who, upon seeing the Sistine Chapel, points at the ceiling and says, "Yeah, but is God's finger relatable? Could we get a version where he is, I don't know, texting?"
For nine years, as an idea-pitching screenwriter, I have been a professional supplicant at the temple of these glorified spreadsheet jockeys. My screenwriter friends, when we meet at cheap, dimly-lit Mumbai bars where gangsters of yore plotted crimes and ex-Bolly writers cliches, we giggle and share the utterly baffling notes we've received from these titans of titillating narrative.
You pitch a heart-wrenching drama about a dying Hindustani classical vocalist losing his voice. Their feedback: "Love the emotion. But could he instead be a tabla player losing his fingers? And maybe he is not dying, he has just... got some mysterious finger-eating disease? We're feeling a real 'tragedy meets horror' genre vibe for Q3."
You then pitch a high-octane action movie about a gangster who makes an "offer you can't refuse" by, in fact, cutting his enemies' fingers. Their feedback: "Too silly. Needs gravitas. Make him a dying Hindustani classical vocalist."
You leave these meetings feeling less like a storyteller and more like a court jester pelted with rotten fruit, focus-grouped for ultimate stink.
So, when I tell you that the multiple-Emmy-award-winning show The Studio—a show that basically bathes in gold statues and whose creators use them as doorstops—has as its protagonist one of these very creatures, you’d understand my visceral instinct to recoil. It is a story too close for comfort. And yet, in its sixth episode, it performed a dark, psychological trick on me, one so profound I'm considering suing them for PTSD.
The episode's story goes thus: Our protagonist, the studio head played with beautiful, shambolic delusion by Seth Rogen, is dating what I call a "civilian" (non-filmy folk): a doctor, no less. He accompanies her to a cancer charity event. Surrounded by people who spend their days performing actual miracles like saving cancer patients, our boy Seth puffs his chest. He starts talking about the "importance" of his work. The gravitas of storytelling. The cultural imperative of getting butts in seats to watch a movie about a superhero whose power is farts caused by indigestion. One of the doctors, who has probably held a human heart in his hands, with the serene patience of someone explaining gravity to a pigeon, comments: "No offence, Matt, but we have serious stakes to deal with." He meant: Were his stakes as important as the lives those doctors literally save?
Well, obviously, not. My rational brain believed so, but you know what I felt at that moment watching it: No, his art is important too, so what if it's about farts, literally. Oh my wicked, traitorous heart!
I was actively, passionately rooting for the purveyor of cinematic escapism over the savers of actual lives? The show had made me empathise with the villain of my own professional story: a coup more impressive than any heist in Ocean’s Eleven. Oh, and the perfect, karma-infused finale of the episode: He is humbled by injuring himself in a profoundly stupid way, where he requires a doctor's attention.
I laughed while still feeling a strange sense of solidarity with the 'studiohead'. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the black magic of brilliant writing, something I delusionally think I possess.
The Studio doesn't just make you like the unlikeable; it makes you understand the ecosystem of ego that is Hollywood and even today's Bollywood; worlds where hierarchy isn't a corporate flowchart but a fluid, ever-shifting dance of power. There is no high chair from which the most powerful person looks down upon juniors; instead, that person is often sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating bread-samosa with adrak chai, while casually greenlighting a Rs-200-crore project.
The power isn't in the furniture; it's a silent, gravitational force that everyone in the room instinctively feels and orbits around. The Studio captures this fluidity perfectly: the way a star, a director, and a spot boy can, for one fleeting moment on set, be equals in the face of a logistical nightmare.
And then there are the episodes themselves, which are so meta that they risk disappearing into their own intellect, but instead emerge triumphant, waving a flag made of pure comedic genius.
Take Episode 4. Someone off-handedly mentions that their script being shot is a rip-off of Chinatown. And there is the mystery of a missing film can. So, our studio head thinks he is Jake Gittes, as a series of wardrobe malfunctions sees him don a comically clichéd detective hat and trench coat as he proceeds to stalk around the set, which, naturally, is a replica of Chinatown, trying to "solve the mystery".
It is a surreal, cerebral hall of mirrors, where life and art imitating art imitating life blur so completely, that you half-expect someone to whisper, "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." It is undulatingly funny because it is true. In Hollywood, as I know of Bollywood, many do not just reference movies; they start living inside them.
Then there's Episode 2, a piece of art so audacious like Adolescence, it should be arrested for indecency of the airwaves. The plot revolves around a director attempting to shoot the final scene of a movie in a single, continuous take. Our studio head, buzzing with the nervous energy of a toddler on a sugar high, keeps blundering into the shot, ruining take after take.
And you know what’s so brilliant in this episode: The entire 24-minute episode is shot in one breathtaking, seamless, technically sorcerous single take. You're not just watching a story about a one-take shot (what we call a oner); you're experiencing the sweaty-palmed, heart-pounding, don't-you-dare-breathe-wrong tension of it in real-time.
And the cameos! Oh, the cameos. We're not talking about lazy pop-ins and outs like say in Ba***ds of Bollywood. We get legends like Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese playing themselves, but not as polished, red-carpet versions. They are authentically themselves, i.e. wizards, weighed down by the glorious and absurd burden of making screen magic.
In this sense, The Studio becomes the ultimate BTS (Behind-The-Scenes); not just for Hollywood, but for the global film industry. It showcases the funny quirks, the angry tears, the sheer, unadulterated chaos that somehow, miraculously, coalesces into that moment of elation when you scream or hear "Cut!" and know that you have somehow managed to capture something remarkable on a hard drive, destined for a screen.
This is the show's final, beautiful thesis, which, like life itself, is irreverent, irascible, unpredictable, and yet somehow magical. It posits that the world of filmmaking, or the real one all around us, is under no obligation to make sense to you, me, or any nepo-kid out there. It just… is.
You have to find your place in this beautiful, pointless illusion just like you have to inside the film industry. Because at the end of the day, we are all running around in our own personal Chinatown sets, wearing stupid hats, trying to solve mysteries that are probably unsolvable, and getting in the way of the perfect take. And it is all completely, gloriously meaningless.
The philosopher Epicurus had a stoical phrase that many Greeks 2000 years ago used to inscribe on their tombstones: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo; that translates to "I was not, I was, I am not, I care not."
This is the perfect epitaph for The Studio, and for the industry it so lovingly skewers. We were not here, then we were, making a glorious, ridiculous fuss for a brief moment, and soon we will not be. And in the face of that, what is there to do but not care? Or better yet, what is there to do but make a brilliant, hilarious, Emmy-hoarding show about the whole magnificent, stupid, and utterly beautiful charade of it all?
The Studio is not just a show. It's a state of grace told as a joke, delivered one punchline after another, into the gut of Hollywood, and every film industry anywhere in the world.
