Never have Rogen’s smart/dumb powers been so evident than in The Studio, the Apple TV series he has created with his frequent collaborator Evan Goldberg (Superbad), industry veterans Peter Huyuck (The Larry Sanders Show) and Alex Gregory (Veep), and a relative newcomer, Frida Perez (American Pickle).

Rogen plays Matt Remick, a passionate film lover and movie executive who is unexpectedly promoted to head of production at Continental Pictures, the studio where he has worked for twenty years. Having finally grasped the power to ‘green light’ movies, Matt is determined to produce the types of quality film classics he adores while still, somehow, making the studio piles and piles of cash.

The pilot episode perfectly captures Matt’s Faustian bargain when the studio’s terrifying CEO, Griffin Mill (played with relish by Bryan Cranston), instructs Matt to make a hit movie using the IP of the Kool-Aid Man. His reasoning is crass Hollywood maths: ‘If Warner Brothers can make a billion fucking dollars off the plastic tits of a pussyless doll, we should be able to make two billion dollars off the legacy brand of Kool-Aid.’ In a narrative turn that is surprisingly plausible and too good to spoil here, Matt recruits none other than Martin Scorsese (playing himself in an Emmy-worthy cameo) to direct the planned film. Of course, being satire, it all ends in tears, specifically Scorsese’s tears.

Like much of Rogen’s work, it’s dumb, it’s smart, and it’s very, very funny, not just for film geeks but for anyone with even a passing interest in the vast amounts of blood, guts, luck, and sheer insanity required to make movies happen.

In terms of making it happen, Rogen, who co-directs all the episodes with Goldberg, swings for the fences in terms of technical execution and, in most cases, knocks it out of the cinematic park. The second episode demonstrates this most overtly when Matt visits a film set where Academy Award-winning writer/director Sarah Polley (yes, playing herself) is trying to finish her film with an extremely complicated ‘one-shot’, a long take where there are no edits. Desperate to ingratiate himself with the talent and not be seen as a typical studio suit, Matt bumbles along and his gaucherie sees the situation end in more tears (although not Scorsese’s this time). To top it off, the entire twenty-five-minute episode is filmed in an incredible, and flawless, single shot. It is a truly mind-boggling feat that is matched only by the Netflix series Adolescence, albeit with very different tonal results.

The series bubbles along with a playful effervescence, supported by an army of celebrity cameos, all playing themselves, including Ron Howard, Zac Efron, Paul Dano, Charlize Theron, Ice Cube, Steve Buscemi, Aaron Sorkin, and, astonishingly, Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix. Even Apple’s biggest rival seems to love this show.

The Studio owes more than a passing debt to Robert Altman’s classic The Player (1992), which incidentally opens with a stunning one-shot sequence, features dozens of celebrity cameos playing themselves, and includes a studio executive by the name of Griffin Mill. Is this the same Griffin Mill who is now Matt’s boss? Could be.

The series wisely avoids any serialisation, keeping each episode a self-contained disaster for Matt to figure out with his nervy studio colleagues (played with lively gusto by Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders, and Kathryn Hahn).

Ike Barinholtz as Sal Saperstein, Chase Sui Wonders as Quinn Hackett, Seth Rogan as Matt Remick and Kathryn Hahn as Maya Mason (courtesy of Apple)

The unbridled energy and ambition of this series makes it clear that Rogen and his collaborators love cinema (both the minutiae of its technical process and its deep historical culture). Why else would they make it so hard for themselves? The expense and complicated task of scheduling so many cameos, while also routinely devising numerous do-or-die, one-shot sequences, is exactly the sort of creative risk-taking that Hollywood prefers to avoid. As Matt says at the end of the first episode, ‘I got into this job because I love movies, now it’s my job to ruin them.’

One of the delicious ironies of the series is that it is screening exclusively on Apple Plus, a major streaming platform, one of many that have utterly transformed the movie business to the despair of auteurs like Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan and, yes, even Martin Scorsese. Thirty-three years ago, a merciless satire about the movie business was turned into The Player. Even ten years ago, an idea like The Studio would have been a two-hour movie we paid to see in a cinema. Today, it’s a ten-episode series we can watch from the comfort of our couch. Is something lost in all of this? Maybe. Personally, I would pay to see this series in a theatre packed with fellow film lovers. But that’s never going to happen (for a start it’s at least six hours long).

Despite this, the snappy television format of thirty- to forty-five-minute episodes serves the premise extremely well, capturing as it does the unrelenting momentum and pressure of movie production in a way that is both hilarious and panic-inducing. Some may be triggered (I know I was). But, as Patty, Matt’s mentor and ex-boss (played to perfection by Katherine O’Hara), explains, ‘When it all comes together, and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.’

The Studio (Lionsgate Television) is streaming on Apple TV+.