How Apple TV+’s The Studio channels Canadian childhood friends Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s rise in Hollywood | Canada Voices

The Studio, the new Hollywood-set comedy series from Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen on Apple TV+, is a satirical picture of dysfunction and disruption in the declining American motion picture business.

By contrast, the production house behind it, created by those two Canadian childhood friends, is on the rise – and by all accounts wielding its increasing power in both film and television in a gentler, kinder and certainly less backstabbing way. And, more and more, it’s doing so back where they grew up.

Co-directed by Rogen and Goldberg, full of long takes and nods to classic films from Chinatown to The Player, The Studio’s 10-episode snapshot of cinema in shambles focuses on Remick (played by Rogen), the newly appointed head of Continental Studios. Though the (fictional) studio has a century of movie history behind it and still shepherds billion-dollar franchises, Remick struggles to get the respect he desperately craves from artists and audiences in a world dominated by streaming.

He is trolled by doctors at a fundraising gala about how they haven’t been in a movie theatre since the pandemic, and he has to plead with a star at the Golden Globes to mention his name in her acceptance speech (even as Netflix co-head Ted Sarandos is thanked from the podium over and over.)

Remick’s redeeming quality – and his Achilles heel – is that he truly loves film as both art form and physical medium. The insecure executive is required to make knock-off horror movies, chase intellectual property such as Kool-Aid and interfere with or bury films by auteurs in the name of the bottom line.

“I love movies and now I feel like it’s my job to ruin them,” he frets in the first episode.

That line, according to Goldberg and Rogen, comes verbatim from a studio executive the friends met when they were still getting established as a creative duo in Los Angeles. (The two spoke to The Globe and Mail in separate video interviews.)

Indeed, The Studio is full of the pair’s experiences and observations from a quarter-century in Hollywood – though, of course, exaggerated for comic effect.

“Every episode is based on something we’ve seen or experienced,” says Rogen, who first moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to act in Judd Apatow’s cult 1999 television show Freaks and Geeks and was joined by Goldberg a few years later.

The examples range “from being at an awards show and seeing an executive literally crying because they weren’t thanked in a speech, to seeing producers hide from people they don’t want to give notes to, to seeing infighting between executives trying to take each other’s jobs.”

These days, Rogen and Goldberg, who achieved breakout success as movie screenwriters with Superbad in 2007, are no longer a couple of Canadians knocking on the door of Hollywood. They’re both 42-year-old major players at the centre of it, as their new insider, celebrity-stuffed spoof shows.

Rogen recently appeared on the cover of Esquire with the title: “It’s Seth Rogen’s Show Now” – and his and Goldberg’s expansive clout and connections might best be exemplified by the names they got to participate in The Studio. The star turns include a cameo from Netflix’s Sarandos (on an Apple TV+ show) and an episode-long performance from Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley, who hadn’t acted onscreen in more than a decade.

But the series is just one of a dozen film and television projects active or in development from their company Point Grey Pictures, which they founded in 2011 and now run with James Weaver. (It’s named after the Vancouver high school the creative partners attended.)

Though it has just 15 people on staff, Point Grey is involved in pop-culture phenomena, (including Prime Video’s The Boys, the superhero allegory about fascism shot in Toronto and Hamilton, and the rebooted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise), as well as more niche fare that channels the duo’s distinct comedic voice (such as the talking foodstuffs animated series Sausage Party: Foodtopia). It also has a first-look deal with the larger Lionsgate Television, which co-produces The Studio.

And while The Studio depicts a Hollywood environment where executives are constantly in fear of being fired and so always seeking jobs with competitors, Point Grey aims to build up its talent from within, rather than courting outside producers with connections.

“We’ve structured it in a way that no other company is structured, in that we bring people into the company, always, at the assistant position – and then they can move up from there,” Goldberg explains.

That was even the case with Weaver, now president of the company. Same with The Studio co-creator Frida Perez, who wrote the show along with Rogen and Goldberg and The Larry Sanders Show/Veep veterans Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory.

The Studio’s onscreen talent is likewise a mix of industry veterans and newcomers.

Canadian comic icon Catherine O’Hara, acting with Rogen for the first time, plays Patty Leigh, the Continental Studios ousted head who knows where all the bodies (and contract clauses) are buried. Chase Sui Wonders, who has mainly acted in drama and horror in Hollywood but wrote for The Harvard Lampoon in college, plays Machiavellian junior movie executive Quinn Hackett, who weaponizes her status as the main Gen Z on the lot.

Both actresses say the on-set environment was completely different from the fraught ones full of actor-director-producer-executive conflicts seen on the show.

“I kind of imagined comedy is a place where like, if you don’t say something funny, you get kind of, like, bullied for it,” says Wonders, who calls The Studio her first “full-on” comedy. “But Seth and Evan – and everyone on this set – are very generous laughers.”

Similarly, O’Hara found Rogen and Goldberg to not be possessive about their scripts – and even happy to receive her rewrites of scenes. “It’s the only way I know how to work,” she says. “And it’s so lovely to get to work with people who actually collaborate and want to hear your ideas.” (Says Rogen: “She would rewrite the scenes and make them 1,000 times better.”)

The filmmakers who play themselves in – legends such as Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard, as well as relative newcomers Parker Finn and Olivia Wilde – were invited to amp-up their portrayals.

“We’d say, ‘We can go harder at you, we can alter this and add an element that’s not true to your nature to make it more comedic. Let’s talk about it,‘” Goldberg recalls.

To get Polley to perform – in a particularly memorable episode about long takes that was itself captured in one long shot – Rogen simply texted the director, whom he had worked with on Take This Waltz, recalls Goldberg, who adds she said yes immediately.

“Sarah was just like, ‘Let’s make me way meaner. Let’s just make me a much more vindictive person.‘”

In the particular manner it has these big names play themselves, The Studio was less inspired by 21st-century hits such as Entourage or Curb Your Enthusiasm than by The Larry Sanders Show – the influential 1990s HBO series starring Garry Shandling as a fictional late-night talk-show host.

Rogen, who like Goldberg watched it religiously growing up, is directly connected to that show’s lineage.

“When I first moved to L.A., Pete [Huyck] and Alex [Gregory] and Judd [Apatow] – the group of people I fell in with – had worked on The Larry Sanders Show, and Gary was sort of like the elder statesman,” Rogen says. ”So, I got to know him and work with him and he was always so funny and so inspirational.”

As for Point Grey’s plans after The Studio, it may be a surprise to some that Canadian television is more and more a part of them.

Rogen and Goldberg’s production house was one of the companies behind the CBC’s 2024 unscripted show The Great Canadian Pottery Throw Down, and it recently signed a deal with Bell Media to create its first Canadian scripted show for CTV and Crave (the subject of which neither of them will spill the beans on).

“We’ve always wanted to make more stuff in Canada, obviously,” says Goldberg, who adds he’s up in Ontario all the time for The Boys.

“The pottery show was a good step in that direction, and we wanna keep working towards doing more Canadian stuff. Honestly, I’m, embarrassed it took us this long.”

As for how the tariffs and tensions between the U.S. and Canada that have emerged since Donald Trump returned to the U.S. presidency will effect the dual citizens and their company, Goldberg is unsure. “We’ve yet to actually make something in Canada since that has started, so in terms of the brass-tacks effect of it, I don’t know what it’ll be,” he says. “It’ll be something.”

Before Trump started threatening to annex Canada, Hollywood was doing it on the sly, with the real-life versions of Rogen’s Remick character inevitably asking screenwriters to set almost every film envisioned with a Canadian backdrop in the United States instead. That’s what happened in the case of Superbad and 2008’s Pineapple Express, which Rogen and Goldberg had originally set north of the border.

“We still have things that people bring to us that are Canadian and we get told like, ‘Could you make it in America?‘” Goldberg says. “That keeps happening.”

The Studio’s first two episodes premiere on Apple TV+ on March 26, followed by new episodes every Wednesday.