In his better moments, Rogen has made a work of real filmmaking about the disappointments of the movie industry. The Studio overlays high cinematography atop inevitably low stakes, with long tracking shots, a propulsive jazz soundtrack, and musical overlapping dialogue bringing to life a world of pettiness, ego, and constant self-compromise. The finished package is funny, gorgeous to stare at, and again, expensive. But it’s too gorgeous, and the glamour, whatever it costs in dollar terms, feels cheaply earned. The Studio hints at a larger crisis in American movies without having anything much to say about it.

The psychodrama of the entertainment industry does not have to be a naval-gazing or frivolous topic. Entertainment molds and reflects the popular imagination — movies are a ready-made vocabulary for the buried urges and dreams of hundreds of millions of us. Or at least they used to be: The US alone has lost over 5,600 movie screens since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with box office receipts down over 25% since 2019. During the global health panic, going to the movies, which is to say the shared experience of popular art within an environment physically and psychologically severed from the lesser “real” world, just wasn’t deemed that important, even by the studios themselves. Movies now hit the streaming services within months or even weeks of short-run theatrical releases. Small wonder that even the Marvel franchise can’t fill theaters anymore.

The Studio comments on all of this only obliquely. In the Continental boardroom, there’s an unmissable large photograph of the Cinerama Dome, the geodesic 1960s landmark that shuttered during the pandemic and whose future is still in question. In the first episode, Rennick gets the wonderful news that Continental has acquired the intellectual property rights to the Kool-Aid brand, leading to error-filled comedy over whether there’s a way to wring any artistic value out of what passes for mass-market entertainment these days. Any critique is greatly softened by the fact that Rennick’s boss, played by a wonderfully demented Bryan Cranston, is such a caricature of ’70s uber-producer Robert Evans, maker of The Godfather and Chinatown, that two different people compare him to Evans in case the parallel wasn’t already clear. They might be Kool-Aid hustlers now, but rest assured, it’s still the Hollywood of hard-driving wild men, personality types who made the eras where art and taste still reigned. The edifice is secure: After all, Cranston’s Evans clone greenlit that Polley-directed lesbian arthouse film in the second episode. Polley’s last feature, the critically lauded Women Talking, made back less than half its budget at the box office. The best of The Studio’s three first episodes takes place in a prepandemic fantasy world where everyone’s afraid to tell Howard that a 45-minute neo-expressionist afterlife sequence in his upcoming movie has to be cut.

Every great Hollywood self-consideration captures the entertainment-industrial complex at the threshold of a historic shift. Singin’ in the Rain opens with the advent of the talking picture; the plot of Robert Altman’s The Player, the funnier, darker, shorter, and in every way superior work whose over-obvious influence haunts every second of The Studio, revolves around the literal murder of a ’70s New Hollywood weirdo-type at the hands of a shiny-suit, bean-counting ’90s studio goon. It isn’t strictly about Hollywood, but much of the charm and a lot of the better plotlines in 30 Rock come from the anachronism of a scripted variety show such as TGS With Tracy Jordan in a time when networks were competing to be as stupid and desperate as possible.

FOR COMMANDERS FANS, THE STRANGE FEELING OF SUCCESS

In contrast, The Studio shrugs at the seismic forces of its day. The dream factory is still standing in Rogen’s world, and no one fears its imminent collapse. In the first three episodes, streaming is mentioned once and only once. “Give me back my movie, and I’ll sell it to Apple the way I should’ve done in the first place,” Martin Scorcese seethes when he realizes that Rennick has pulled a slimy catch-and-kill maneuver on a planned epic about the Jonestown massacre. See, the streamers aren’t destroying cinema — maybe they’re actually saving it from the commercial adulterations of the multiplex. It’s unclear if Rogen really believes this, and the show is smart and self-aware enough that it’s possible a broader reckoning with the state of the film industry is coming in future episodes.

But maybe not. You do not have to go back very far in American cinematic history to start getting a real whiff of dread. Take Rogen’s career, for instance. He became a permanent A-lister thanks to his turns as an interchangeable stoner everyman in Superbad, Pineapple Express, and Knocked Up, late-aughts classics that made a combined $490 million in theater receipts. A rise such as Rogen’s would be impossible now, in a time when popular comedies barely exist and the theaters that used to show them are dying out. Maybe it’s best to share a laugh with Howard and go along as if nothing’s really changed.

Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.