The Opposite Of ‘Oh Yeah!’

I’d no intention of writing anything about new Apple TV show The Studio but Charlie Jane’s observations of the early episodes changed my mind, although I’ve dropped the show after its fourth episode. It batted .500 for me and while that’s great for a baseball player it’s grossly insufficient for a television show.

What prompted me in Charlie Jane’s newsletter is that she says “the first two episodes didn't entirely land for me, especially the first one” while for me it not only was the other way around (although I actually enjoyed the first) but it was the other way around precisely for the reasons she calls out as the tightrope the show tries and fails to walk. While I enjoyed the first episode (“The Promotion”), the second episode (“The Oner”) for me was borderline unwatchable.

(For what it’s worth, my ranking of those first four episodes is: “The Promotion”, “The Note”, “The Missing Reel”, and “The Oner”.)

Here’s how Charlie Jane opens her critique of the first episode, “The Promotion”:

The show sets up an absurdist situation that ultimately doesn't ring true and makes Rogen's character appear wildly delusional.

She continues:

This is obviously a super heightened premise, which is intentionally absurd. But it does make Rogen's character seem so incompetent that it's obvious he should never have gotten that job.

Weirdly, because opinions are like that, these are precisely the reasons why “The Oner” was excruciating for me while “The Promotion” worked. In the first episode, I bought what seemed to me to be the premise, which was that Matt’s excitement over his new position addled his brain a bit and sent him wildly out over his skis. His sense of self-importance and self-righteousness caused him to get ahead of himself in his need to be seen as a serious film guy. It helped, to be sure, that I might totally watch a Martin Scorsese film about Jonestown called Kool-Aid.

When it came to “The Oner”, however, this suddenly was just a self-satisfied white guy with no discernible talents fucking everything up for everyone around him who were the ones getting the actual work done. Maybe it’s the current climate of gestures at everything but I just don’t find that an engaging or entertaining thing, and felt little need to subject myself to it. In fact, I quit the episode halfway through in exasperation and only went back later because I didn’t want to watch episode three without having finished episode two

(For much the same reason, I never made it past the first episode of Netflix’s The Diplomat because I couldn’t stand having to watch the self-important husband who couldn’t stop inserting himself where he no longer belonged, and obviously this was going to be a substantial element in the show.)

Charlie Jane is right that the core of the show is that Matt “sincerely, passionately wants to create great art and just cannot get out of his own way”. I just think it’s dramatically and more artlessly on display in the second episode than it is in the first, and then the fourth episode is just generally artless all around.

Anyway, the point is that I will not be watching beyond episode four, “The Stolen Reel”, which gave “The Oner” a run for its money on terribleness but in this case just because it’s glaringly obvious who stole the reel and glaringly obvious that there’s an unofficial wrap party and I find it exhausting watching characters run around unable to see the most obvious things happening right in front of their face. It’s possible that this was the point of the episode, but if so it simply wasn’t at all well-executed and the only other option was that the writers really thought the glaringly obvious wasn’t glaringly obvious, which: sigh.

In the end I suppose that’s my problem with the show as a whole: the most glaringly obvious thing of all is that Matt should not be the head of the studio to begin with, and I just don’t have time for the proposition that watching a mediocre, middle-aged white guy making life difficult for those around him without consequence is in any way whatsoever meant to be taken as an entertainment.