On “Hacks” and “The Studio,” Hollywood Confronts Its Flop Era

For years now, Hollywood has been on a losing streak. In the film and television business, good news has been harder to come by than original stories, with the successive disruptions of the pandemic, the writers’ and actors’ strikes, and the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles in January. “Survive till 2025” was the motto that kept the town going last year, but this year has offered little reprieve. Production is down, jobs are scarce, and morale is low; scripted entertainment is losing the battle for eyeballs to video games, YouTube, and social media. (Over the weekend, Trump himself weighed in, writing on Truth Social that “the Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death”—while proposing tariffs that could hasten its demise.) In a recent New York magazine profile of David Zaslav, perhaps the most hated exec in L.A., the writer Michael Wolff pronounced that the industry’s “gradual decline” has “arguably reached the all-at-once stage.”

If Hollywood still can’t resist telling stories about itself, it can at least strive for honesty about its flop era. That’s the guiding ethos of two insidery show-biz series this spring: the current season of the Max dramedy “Hacks” and the new Apple TV+ comedy “The Studio.” On “Hacks,” a long-stymied comic named Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) finally lives out her dream of hosting her own late-night program, only to discover that she’s been crowned the queen of a castle made of sand. And, in “The Studio,” Seth Rogen stars as Matt Remick, a freshly promoted movie executive who soon realizes that his new job is to “ruin” the medium he loves in pursuit of profit.

For its first three seasons, much of the pleasure of “Hacks” lay in its examination of life on the D-list. We saw Deborah through the eyes of Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a wunderkind comedy writer who gets cancelled after tweeting a bad joke and ends up in Las Vegas, where Deborah has a fading residency. Ava helps Deborah shake the cobwebs off her act, and Deborah introduces her to the myriad, often shady money-making opportunities afforded to those no longer chasing prestige: QVC clothing lines, supplements businesses, cruise gigs. At the end of Season 3, after the two have successfully reinvented her persona and rebuilt her career, Deborah lands the late-night show of her dreams and promises to make Ava head writer, only to renege at the eleventh hour—prompting Ava to clinch the position via blackmail instead.

Season 4, the first to be set firmly in L.A., charts the aftermath. In the press, the two are the very picture of feminist solidarity. Deborah is the first woman at eleven-thirty; Ava is the youngest head writer in the history of late-night TV. But, behind the scenes, their mutual resentments threaten to derail the entire enterprise. (When Ava tries to convince Deborah to let her take control of the writers’ room, telling her, “I’m trying to make your life easier,” Deborah responds, “Then kill yourself.”) Neither can afford the dysfunction. Their task isn’t just to create a hit show, but to redeem all of late-night. “It wasn’t a choice between you and someone else to host,” a network boss (Helen Hunt) informs them. “It was a choice between you and no one.” To be deemed a success, they’re expected to emulate the likes of James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke,” which became the source not only of viral clips but a five-season spinoff series. These days, a show isn’t worth launching if it can’t spawn a franchise.

This bleak vision of Hollywood makes for a fascinating backdrop. Deborah and Ava’s mandate reflects real-world anxieties about audience retention. The portrait is deepened by the parallel plight of Deborah’s manager, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs), and his own protégé turned partner, Kayla (Meg Stalter). One subplot involves their struggles to manage another difficult client: a bite-prone Collie starring in a TV remake of “Lassie.” Loopy but astute, Kayla quickly demonstrates her ability to navigate this diminished version of the industry by getting the half-hour series green-lighted at a time when “no one is buying” them. (The line is also an oblique acknowledgement of a painful reality: streaming companies, many of whose subscription bases are international, prefer content that can “travel,” so comedies, which tend to be more culturally rooted, have become a hard sell around town.) The surest sign, perhaps, of the business’s increasing irrelevance is its dependence on the kind of social-media star power its gatekeepers still don’t fully understand. Deborah, who’s always willing to suspend her own judgment if it gets her the reaction that she craves, brings on to the show a TikToker named Dance Mom (Julianne Nicholson, in a delirious comic performance). Dance Mom proves a hit, but the version of the show that Deborah and Ava can take pride in slips further and further away.

Female ambition is “Hacks” ’s object of obsession, and while the series’ portrayal of Hollywood feels timely, it’s used mostly in service of developing the central theme. Early in the season, Deborah explains to Ava that she isn’t the right person to lead her writers’ room: Ava’s taste is too political, too niche, and “late-night is for housewives and mechanics.” The pair have worked hard to find Deborah’s voice, but by straining it further in a bid for mass appeal, she risks losing it all over again. Blind ambition can take you upward—or land you on a glass cliff.

In “The Studio,” the three real-life showrunners of “Hacks”—Downs, Jen Statsky, and Lucia Aniello—make a cameo as the rare Hollywood creatives lucky or savvy enough to get quality shows made and to win awards for them. The scene is set at the Golden Globes, and their appearance is bookended by cracks from Ramy Youssef, the evening’s host, about the otherwise dire state of the industry. “I’m starting to feel like I have to go to the movies,” he says. “Like, if I don’t buy a ticket, the whole thing’s gonna fall apart.”

“The Studio” is much more explicitly about Hollywood’s decline. In its pilot, Matt Remick, the new studio head played by Rogen, is given an edict by his boss, Griffin (Bryan Cranston), to make “movies,” not “films”—beginning with a blockbuster about Kool-Aid. (Griffin has aspirations for features based on Jenga and the Rubik’s Cube as well.) Matt, a devoted cinephile, thinks he’ll be able to have it both ways, envisioning a “Barbie”-esque brand-based auteurist project helmed by his hero, Martin Scorsese. Instead, he’s forced to kill the legendary director’s passion project. That night, Matt and his deputy, Sal (Ike Barinholtz), watch Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” to remind themselves why they got into the business in the first place.

There’s something undeniably cathartic about a figure as successful as Rogen, who co-created the series, speaking out about Hollywood’s creative cowardice. (It’s possible he’s feeling the pinch, too; Hollywood has drastically cut down on the kind of mid-budget theatrical comedies that made him a star two decades ago.) And, like “Hacks,” “The Studio” has a great ear for insult comedy: the boorish Sal calls A24’s output the purview of “pansexual mixologists living in Bed-Stuy.”

But the series is better at diagnosing the problem than at getting us to care about those responsible. Matt and his direct reports quickly reveal themselves to be spineless, self-important, thin-skinned, and out of touch. On a date at a gala for pediatric oncologists, Matt insists that the hyperviolent franchise he helped launch, which involves a superhero who telepathically explodes heads, is “art,” and that his job is just as important as the doctors’. (To triple down, he rubs in their face the fact that he makes more money than they do.) With people like him in charge, “The Studio” implies, it’s no wonder the multiplexes are full of such dreck. And, though we catch glimpses of the kinds of films Matt ostensibly wants to shepherd into the world, it’s the blandly schlocky Kool-Aid movie that we’re stuck with episode after episode.

Like most Rogen projects, “The Studio” is proudly potty-mouthed but ultimately toothless. One gets the feeling that the actor-producer is too ensconced in the system to truly go for broke. Where “The Franchise,” last year’s short-lived HBO satire of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, gleefully eviscerated its targets, “The Studio” is far gentler with the many real-life figures who pop up throughout the season. Perhaps the most revealing guest appearance is that of the Netflix co-C.E.O. Ted Sarandos, in the episode set at the Globes. Netflix is cleaning up, and Sarandos is praised endlessly by his artists (including Jean Smart) in every acceptance speech; Matt, meanwhile, is on the verge of a meltdown as he tries to persuade Zoë Kravitz to publicly acknowledge his existence. When the two men run into each other in the bathroom, an agonized Matt asks how he gets the talent to appreciate him. “It’s contractual. I force them to,” Sarandos says, baffled. “Otherwise, why in the world would they possibly thank us?” ♦