Wait, Seth Rogen’s Apple TV Show Is Actually So Funny

The Studio is like a hybrid of Entourage, Inherent Vice, and Hacks.

I don’t exactly know when Seth Rogen started annoying me to the high heavens. He certainly was funny back in the day and a great actor.

But I guess I found Sausage Party unwatchable, and looking at his IMDB lately, he’s just been doing, like, voices in kids’ movies like Chip ‘n Dale and The Super Mario Movie. So when people kept telling me to watch his new Apple TV show, The Studio, I shrugged it off. Oh, I also hated that movie about the end of the world or whatever.

But, woah, The Studio is so good!

It’s actually just really darn funny. The running joke about Kool-Aid (you gotta watch it to get it) had me chuckling every other minute in the first episode, and I found myself laughing out loud about it many times the next day.

And yes, while the show is funny, it’s also kind of tense and anxiety-inducing, so it has a nice thriller element running through it—never too heavy, but definitely gripping. A perfect show to unwind with at the end of the day.

The celebrity cameos—Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz, Zac Efron, Olivia Wilde, Bryan Cranston, Ice Cube, Ramy Youssef, Aaron Sorkin, and so on — add a funny layer of realism that makes the satire even sharper. The whole thing feels like Hollywood roasting itself.

As Rogen explained, the heart of the show came from something a real Hollywood executive once told him. Early in his career, while getting notes on a script, the exec literally said, “I got into this because I love movies, and now it’s my job to ruin them.” This reality is what The Studio is built around. But Rogen definitely didn’t ruin this TV show, so give it a try, even if you think you hate Seth Rogen.