Review | Can a Hollywood mogul be relatable? Seth Rogen tries in ‘The Studio.’

Kathryn Hahn, Catherine O’Hara and Ike Barinholtz co-star in Apple TV+’s formally brilliant, star-studded satire of a movie industry in decline.

It’s typical of Matt Remick, the protagonist of Apple TV+’s Hollywood satire “The Studio,” that he loves, or thinks he loves, film. Film as opposed to TV. Film as in the stuff stored in reels. “I just love the grain,” the Hollywood executive, played by Seth Rogen, says at one point. “You know the way it dances, even in the static parts of the frame.” Remick is nostalgic. He’s ambitious. He’s very rich and a little snobby. And, thanks to a recent shake-up at a fictional movie studio called Continental, he’s suddenly — at a moment when movie studios are in crisis — the guy in charge of green-lighting what does and doesn’t get made.

“The Studio” follows Rogen’s Remick as he figures out how to be a boss. He isn’t especially bright, and he’s only sporadically principled. A Hollywood studio executive convinced that he’s not like other studio executives, he thinks of himself as an artist too — via osmosis. “Film is my life,” he says in the pilot. But everything’s negotiable: When head honcho Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) fires Remick’s mentor, Patty (Catherine O’Hara), and offers him her job — provided he manages to curb his interest in “artsy-fartsy filmmaking” and focus on profit — Remick agrees. And when Mill confides he’s nearly secured the rights to “Kool-Aid” (yes, the drink) and reminds Remick that “we don’t make film, we make movies,” he practically cheers. Among friends, he’ll confess his real goal: to get an auteur to make a Kool-Aid movie that’s a moneymaker but also actually, somehow, good.

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While clearly doomed to fail in the show’s universe, Remick’s plan more or less captures what “Studio” creators Rogen, Alex Gregory, Evan Goldberg, Frida Perez and Peter Huyck have achieved in this impressive little comedy about genial sellouts. It’ll tell you something about how “The Studio” splices highbrow winks with lowbrow humor that Remick’s absurdist journey as a hapless executive opens with a six-minute oner — a long, uninterrupted camera take that usually, when it shows up in TV, signals cinematic seriousness. (“True Detective” had one; so did “The Bear,” not to mention each episode of Netflix’s “Adolescence.”)

This particular oner (the first of many) is technically challenging and thematically pointed: “The Studio” is a TV show hosted by a streamer about how much the movies hate TV (and streamers). It opens, accordingly, as a film being shot at the studio, with the leading man, played by Paul Dano, being shot by his mentee and mirthlessly reflecting on his protégé’s desire to be boss (a dynamic that largely spoofs Remick’s haste to replace Patty). While the scene is clearly made for the big screen, we belatedly discover, as the camera zooms out, that we’ve been watching on a very tiny one indeed; Dano’s performance was playing on a monitor being watched by director Peter Berg (playing himself), who yells “Cut!” and congratulates him. Watching these two discuss the performance — looking forlorn, sidelined and out of place — is Remick, the studio guy, whom the camera dutifully follows through an amusingly anticlimactic golf cart ride, up stairways and down corridors as he talks to his ambitious assistant, Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders), and his pal and colleague Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), whose boss he becomes. The contrast between film and TV (and the talent vs. the money) has been made clear.

That opening also contains some cheeky nods to Robert Altman’s 1992 Hollywood satire, “The Player,” which — like “The Studio” — featured a technically complicated oner, a mind-boggling number of celebrity cameos and a character named Griffin Mill. “The Studio” excels at cringy humor, but it’s also doing some high-octane, technically impressive stuff and feathering a goofy Rogen comedy with layer after layer of nerdy film goodies.

And self-referential metacommentary. The second episode, called “The Oner” because Remick pops in to watch director Sarah Polley (playing herself) film a complicated and time-sensitive oner starring Greta Lee, is itself a complicated and exquisitely timed 24-minute oner. The fourth episode, in which Olivia Wilde (playing herself) directs a neo-noir detective film and “Chinatown knockoff,” has Rogen wandering around in a hat and trench coat searching for clues. “The Studio” doesn’t quite achieve “Arrested Development’s” density of nested jokes, but it comes surprisingly close.

The formal confidence and comedic virtuosity of the first few episodes are such that merely competent plots, as in “Casting,” the seventh episode this season, feel half-baked by comparison. Efforts to shake up the comedy’s format, like “The War” (which decenters Remick) and “The Pediatric Oncologist” (which sidelines everyone else) yield mixed results, too; the latter, while objectively hilarious, feels stylistically closer to “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “The Studio” tends to be a little more sentimental about its millionaire hero, even as he haplessly struggles with the slow death of the movie industry, self-indulgent directors, various crises concerning minority representation, artificial intelligence and budgets.

Barinholtz has never been better than he is as Sal Saperstein, Rogen’s rival and better-liked No. 2. Kathryn Hahn is endlessly surprising as Maya, the studio’s elaborately coiffed marketing guru. O’Hara, terrific as ever, deserves more screen time than she gets as Remick’s ex-boss, who’s finding professional fulfillment on the creative side after her firing. There are far too many cameos to name, but Zoë Kravitz is a standout. Also good: Zac Efron, Adam Scott, Dave Franco. There’s a lachrymose Martin Scorsese and a vengeful Ron Howard.

Saddled with the toughest job, Rogen manages to remain sympathetic and relatable as a wildly wealthy executive whose ability to read the room waxes and wanes from one episode to the next. Rogen leavens Remick, who is variously clueless, cowardly and intrusive, with flashes of humility and frat-boy humor. He may be pliable, easy to manipulate and temperamentally unsuited to pulling rank on artists he genuinely admires. But, as scripted, he’s usually an amiable loser: trapped in a job that pays him a lot of money but garners him no respect or credit from the artists by whom he yearns to be seen and valued.

“The Studio” — meaning Rogen and Goldberg, who direct all the episodes — makes up for that outside the frame. That little monologue of Remick’s about how much he loves film, for instance? It takes place in an episode filmed entirely, and quite beautifully, on celluloid.

The Studio premieres March 26 on Apple TV+.