Los Angeles Takes Center Stage in Apple TV+ Comedy 'The Studio'

Hollywood has a special sheen in Apple TV+’s The Studio. Like all great stories about Los Angeles — think 1974’s Chinatown, 1992’s The Player and 2016’s La La Land — the frenetic satire radiates with a warm glow and a sparkle of stardust. Even as backs are stabbed and rugs are pulled, the pure adoration for cinema is on full display. Here is a series about movies for people who love movies. 

Co-creator and star Seth Rogen, alongside a team that includes fellow co-creator Evan Goldberg, saw the series as an opportunity to unabashedly “revel in the beauty of Los Angeles.” 

“As people who [have] lived in Los Angeles for a long time, it’s still not lost on us — the magic of the city,” Rogen says.

The Studio — which premiered on March 26 and releases new episodes every Wednesday through May 21 — casts Rogen as Matt Remick, the newly-crowned head of production at the fictional Continental Studios, who attempts to reconcile art and commerce. Among the first tasks levied by his boss (Bryan Cranston) is to create a blockbuster out of the studio’s latest acquisition: the Kool-Aid Man. With a ragtag team of executives and producers — portrayed by Catherine O’Hara, Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders and Kathryn Hahn — he sets out to spin magic out of … well, whatever is being dictated by the overlords. 

“The main thing we chased was a panicked, crazy vibe that is immersive — where you feel like you are in the types of situations we’ve been in,” Goldberg says.

Adds Rogen: “One of the things we [said] when we were first bringing the show together is [that] a lot of our experience in Hollywood is being in very beautiful buildings designed by very brilliant people having the stupidest arguments of all time, and that is something that we hope to capture in the show.” 

erhaps no series has ever served as better advertisement for Los Angeles’ architectural landscape. Production designer Julie Berghoff used the real Warner Bros. lot — itself a near 100-year-old landmark — to stand in for Continental. 

“We knew that the backlot was going to be a big part of our story, and so we wanted as many story opportunities to be available to us [as possible]. So we needed to go with a bigger lot. And we also wanted an older lot,” Berghoff explains. “We liked the color palette of Warner Bros., being that tan, nostalgic feeling.” 

“We loved how the backlot is seamlessly woven into the infrastructure of the lot, as well,” notes Rogen. “There’s this lagoon with this fake lake and these cabins, but if you walk 25 feet, you’re just in the parking lot of an administrative building.” 

When the show ventures outside the studio gates, it features a barrage of L.A. landmarks. A lunch date at Musso & Frank. A deal made at the Smoke House Restaurant. A gala at The Ebell. The Golden Globes at the Beverly Hilton. The characters inhabit quintessentially L.A. homes: O’Hara’s down-on-her-luck producer is found hiding out at her John Lautner-designed midcentury mansion in the pilot — one of three Lautner houses used in the series. 

“He’s such an amazing architect of using the land and where he positions it and how the sun comes through it,” Berghoff says. 

Regular appearances come from the Hollywood elite playing themselves. Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Zac Efron, Zoë Kravitz, Charlize Theron, Ice Cube and Dave Franco are among those that make cameos.

“It was not hard to get any of them to do it,” Goldberg says. “We went to people and said, ‘Here’s who we’ve written you as. Do you want to go higher and crazier, or do you want to stay, or do you want to tone it down?’ No one ever toned it down.” 

Shot in the summer of 2024, The Studio finds itself dropping in a much different L.A. than the one in which it was shot. As California continues to recover from the January wildfires, The Studio seems to be a reminder to the world — through the guise of situational comedy — to not give up on that Tinseltown dream. 

“Part of the conception of this show was to shoot something in Los Angeles, and to make a show that could only be shot in Los Angeles,” Rogen says. “That was really important to us, and to actually shoot it in all these places was always a part of the DNA of the show.”