Reaction: The Studio, "The War" | Season 1, Episode 5

We’re halfway through The Studio’s first season, and “The War” represents a divergence from the show’s pattern thus far. Although we do get some director cameos, they’re not the big names we’ve come to expect, allowing Quinn and Sal to come into focus as the junior executives that Matt is ostensibly in charge of.

It’s the first episode that seems like it represents a direct form of “character development” for anyone outside of Matt, and I think what interested me most was the question of how much any of this would matter. See, on the one hand, Quinn and Sal have been pretty thin characters thus far, and the show is better for giving us a glimpse of the former’s existential crisis of becoming part of the film business just as it’s disintegrating and the latter’s divorced dad energy. But on the other hand, we’ve seen how little oxygen these characters have in what we presume is an average episode of the show—Chase Sui Wonders has been absent in half the episodes thus far, for instance, and hasn’t had a lot to do or say in the episodes she has been in.

The show’s vignette approach means that there really hasn’t been much if any serialization to speak of, and that hasn’t been a huge problem given how the central conflicts of each of the past three episodes have been with directors/actors who haven’t recurred. But this by comparison is about a pretty important relationship central to the show, which spirals into a rather absurd set of circumstances, but which…still seems like it’s mostly swept under the rug by episode’s end. I’ll spoil that Wink won’t end up being a recurring part of the season, but by this point the show has conditioned us to know this to be true. We’re meant to think of this as an ephemeral story of moviemaking in 2025, simply for our amusement and to extend the show’s ongoing thesis.

This is all to say that I’m interested in how Rogen and Goldberg feel about “The War” as a piece of dramaturgy as they work through the show they’ve created. Did they consider this expansion of the ensemble productive? Does it work for the chaos to unravel independent of any type of satirical framework like we saw with “The Oner” and “The Missing Reel?” Is this a format they want to echo with other characters who might not get spotlights this season? And when they got to the end of the season, did they feel this episode resonated in the way they hoped it to?

For me, this was the kind of episode that made me question whether the show has enough substance to write about weekly—there’s just not a lot of depth here in any direction, which doesn’t make it a bad half-hour of TV but shows a series with some kinks to work out.