Editorial note: Spoilers ahead for “The Studio.”
Early on in “The Studio,” co-creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg make it clear that yes, of course their absurdist send-up of Hollywood has to include Jews. In the first half of the show’s first episode, newly minted Continental Studios head Matt Remick (Rogen) and his colleague Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz) meet with agent Mitch Weitz (David Krumholtz) about getting a Kool-Aid movie made.
“And they say there’s no more Jews working in Hollywood, huh?” Weitz greets the pair, establishing for a fact what the audience has all probably been guessing at this point. “Look at us, we’re almost to a minyan!”
Weitz cracks a few more jokes about getting Manischewitz and a lulav for the table before Matt cuts him off. “Yeah we’re all Jewish, that’s very, very funny.” Later, when Matt gets up to take a phone call, Sal turns to Matt and retorts, “Can you say ‘Jew’ more?”
It turns out he, and the show, can.
In episode seven, the Continental Studios team is desperately trying to cast the Kool-Aid movie in a way that is diverse, but not leaning into racial stereotypes. Ultimately Matt, Sal, creative executive Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders) and marketing executive Maya Mason (Kathryn Hahn) decide to make a cast that corresponds to the racial demographics of the United States, leading them to try to figure out how to cast “0.36 of an Asian person.”
“Israel is technically a part of Asia. I would just like to say that,” Matt blurts out and is immediately shot down. “Jews are a race! It’s not my fault that Jews are a race.” He adds, “We are a race of people and a religion. It’s complicated. Do we need Jewish representation in the film? Should we cast Josh Gad?” The answer from the rest of the group is an unequivocal no.
Then in episode eight, Matt runs into Mitch Weitz at the Golden Globes, who can’t stop making Jew jokes. “I know we’re both Jewish,” Matt finally confronts Mitch. “I don’t love the Jew jokes.”
For the viewer, just as it is for Matt, I can understand how the amount of Jewish jokes in “The Studio” might feel a bit much considering the false and antisemitic stereotype that Jews “run” Hollywood. But here’s the thing: Matt Remick and Sal Saperstein are complete schmucks. As my colleague at Kveller Lior Zaltzman so succinctly put it, “They’re more nebbish than machers.” In essence, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are actually cheekily disrupting the Jews run Hollywood stereotype because they’ve made it so Matt and Sal aren’t running Hollywood — they’re putzing around it.
Take, for example, the fact that Matt essentially fell into his role as studio head. A stereotype of a Jewish Hollywood executive would have connived and plotted against Continental Studios head Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara) until he usurped her role. Instead, Matt, who has a mentor-mentee relationship with Patty, is promoted only when studio owner Griffin Mills (Bryan Cranston) unceremoniously fires her. And, in order to fully secure the job, Matt has to promise to Griffin that he’ll make a Kool-Aid movie. Instead of jumping at the obvious box office cash-grab movie idea, like a money-hungry Jewish Hollywood executive might, Matt says yes simply because he doesn’t know how to stand up for himself and his beliefs. Considering the fact that Matt just gave an interview to Variety where he says he wants to make “cinematic works of art,” Matt is starting off his years as the head of Continental Studios looking like a supreme schmuck.
So, too, does this schmuckiness and putzing pervade through the rest of the season. Episodes of “The Studio” are not formulaic by any means, but things are typically going well until Matt and Sal show up. Take for example “The Oner,” in which director Sarah Polley specifically tries to get Matt not to visit her movie set because she’s afraid he’ll mess up her one-take shot, which he inevitably does, costing the studio a lot of time and money. Or “The Missing Reel,” when a canister of film mysteriously goes missing from Olivia Wilde’s movie set and Matt and Sal devise a hair-brained scheme to track it down. Or “The War,” when Sal gets into a turf war with Quinn over a “Smile” rip-off called “Blink,” which results in Sal throwing a burrito at Quinn, the burrito hitting an assistant director in the face while driving a golf cart and the AD and golf cart crashing into a set.
Need I go on?
For what it’s worth, Rogen has said that he and Goldberg weren’t explicitly trying to make a commentary on Jewishness in Hollywood. “It’s something that we poke fun at and something that is not lost on us,” Rogen told the Jewish Chronicle. “It’s more fodder for jokes than some deep messaged agenda that we had to express about the industry.” And, of course, Matt and Sal being clueless fools doesn’t outright refute the Jews run Hollywood stereotype. Matt and Sal are still in the room where it happens, after all, and any antisemite need only point to the Jewishness of these characters to confirm their own prejudices.
But, unintentionally though it may be, “The Studio” finds a very funny and nearly limitless solution to the problem of portraying Jews in Hollywood. If “The Studio” didn’t have any Jewish characters, it would feel inauthentic to an industry that was pioneered by Jewish immigrants and the disproportionate amount of Jews working in the entertainment industry. So too would it feel completely inauthentic to Rogen and Goldberg as Jewish writers. At the same time, if “The Studio” leaned into stereotypes about Jews, it would be problematic and oh-so-overdone. Here, in a more in-between space where the Jewish characters are just as foolish as any of the other big-shot non-Jews in Hollywood, “The Studio” thrives. There’s room for Mitch Weitz to make unsavory Jew jokes, there’s room for Matt Remick to call him out over it, and there’s even room for endearing Jewish representation, like when Zoë Kravitz calls herself a Black Jewish queen in the finale.
So here’s to Matt, Sal and the rest of the Continental Studios gang doing more putzing around Hollywood in season two. L’chaim!
