Reaction: The Studio, "The Presentation" | Season 1, Episode 10

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As a madcap showcase of physical comedy from Bryan Cranston and a showcase for increasingly chaotic cameos from Zoë Kravitz and Dave Franco, “The Presentation” is an extremely entertaining 25 minutes of television. But as a finale to a season of television focused on Matt Remick’s tenure as President of Continental Studios, I… suppose some of my reluctance to fully embrace this show has to do with where things land.

I get the message: after an insane collection of hijinks, Matt stands on a CinemaCon stage as the confetti falls, the Sherman Brothers’ “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” playing as he basks in the glory of the cinema. Does it make any sense that the entire cast of the show are onstage with him? Nope, but it fits with Matt’s thesis that moviemaking is really about the friends you made along the way.

It’s a weird place for a show that expresses such cynicism about the industry to land. It’s technically a cliffhanger, meant to freeze the show’s characters in a moment of hope: if Continental is sold to Amazon, all of this goes away. The pickup for a second season would seemingly suggest this isn’t likely, and the presentation does seem to go well, but not exploring the aftermath puts us in an artificial bubble in a way the show has largely avoided to this point. Even if most of the vignettes end with our characters being largely unaffected—facing no consequences for any particular chaos—there’s never been this kind of effort to wrap things up in a bow. The zoom in on Matt’s earnest joy just didn’t land for me, a romantic moment that too easily lets him off the hook for his own responsibility for the aforementioned chaos.

It’s why I’m so curious what The Studio wants to be in its second season. These final two episodes worked overtime to reframe this as a serialized show, but it honestly works best when it just explores the contradictions of creating art in a commercial context. Trying to turn this into a character study felt like a strain on its comic energy: if you look at the CinemaCon episodes as any type of conclusion to Matt’s arc or really anyone’s story, it falls flat. But if you take them as a madcap mess where the ‘80s movie runner pays off, Dave Franco uses his Now You See Me skills and gets bloodied up by some thugs, and Bryan Cranston is a human puppet swinging across the stage to chants of “Cinema?” The show just works better without placing higher expectations on its storytelling.

Hacks—which Emma has been covering for our paid subscribers—is the other insider-ish Hollywood comedy airing currently, and the odds have the two shows as the frontrunners for the Comedy Series Emmy. It’s an interesting comparison, because ultimately I would argue that they’re both struggling with staying in the correct lane. Over on Hacks, this season has really forced the show to reckon with the fact its grasp on Hollywood doesn’t have a lot of substance, making trying to fashion an ongoing commentary on late night television a bit beyond their reach. It’s really a character study, and attempts to graft that onto a more thorough satire of Hollywood rings false—all the talk show stuff feels entirely incidental to why the show works, and is certainly stranding the Jimmy/Kayla narrative in a void of sorts. (If I get started on Dance Mom I’ll lose my train of thought).

By comparison, The Studio works best when it doesn’t try to focus on the character study, instead letting the engine do its work. To be clear, for the purposes of the first season, we needed time to meet the characters and get a sense of their goals. And there will absolutely be cases where their basic wants and desires will overlap with the narrative in ways that expand our relationship with them, and that’s fine! But the show can’t be about Matt without having to grapple with how toxic he can be, and it would be better if the tension of veering into that territory was absent. It can just be a Hollywood farce, and that’s okay!

Really, it reminds me how effective The Other Two was at threading this needle. Perhaps it was that it evolved its way into more of a Hollywood satire, and didn’t rely as much on verisimilitude as a vessel for its narrative, but it got to do both. The Studio’s attempts to do the same never quite gelled for me, and rather than expect the show to turn into the more nuanced and complex version of itself, I kind of hope they go for broke and just embrace the chaos.

Stray observations

• I thought Dave Franco’s appearance last week was a bit thin, but the bit of him doing the “Previously on” while fucked up was super funny, and his piece of the presentation was a nice appetizer for the main event.
• Catherine O’Hara can make anything work, but her vamping for time wasn’t as sharp as I think I wanted it to be in the flow of things.
• Matt Belloni was asked to do exactly as much as was necessary in this case, and he delivered—insane that Apple submitted him for an Emmy nomination, still, but I appreciate that this is a world where the trades exist.
• If I’m handicapping Emmy nominations: Rogen, Barinholtz, O’Hara, Cranston. I’m rooting for Polley, but I figure Kravitz has the better shot.
• I’ll acknowledge that I binged through this when the screeners became available, and it definitely played a bit better that way, with individual installments—as I anticipated—not quite inspiring as much to discuss. So I’m curious how people feel after seeing the entire season, and how you’d feel about coverage returning for season two. As ever, likes and comments are the clearest indication of interest.