There have been a lot of memorable moments on The Studio as it’s aired on the 2025 TV schedule, from Charlize Theron delivering a “baller” one-liner to Ron Howard playing himself as an “asshole.” Hell, the opening episode even explored Martin Scorsese making a Jonestown movie under the title Kool-Aid, and just a few weeks later, it was announced that Bill Hader is developing a Jonestown TV series. But another thing I’ve been noticing on the Apple TV+ subscription-exclusive series is how much Seth Rogen falls on it. Not only did two of the executive producers tell me why this is, they also talked about the one time Rogen legitimately did trip on camera.
When I brought up how frequently Rogen’s Matt Remick has taken tumbles on The Studio to executive producers Frida Perez and Peter Huyck, the latter explained that it this aspect of his character was included to help the series harken back to a more timeless style of comedy. In his words:
I think we like old school pratfalls, classic physical comedy felt like an area that… [that] kind of comedy had gotten more dramatic, more intense, and it was just fun to see… what was funny 100 years ago is still funny. A guy who's wiping out and eating shit at the wrong moment is just always gonna make you laugh.
A lot of humor can be funny in the time the joke, sequence, etc. was made, but doesn’t effectively age as the years pass. But like Peter Huyck said, there physical comedy gags the early years of film are still funny a century later, and those gags were inspired by the earlier entertainment genre of vaudeville. So while most of The Studio’s humor is dialogue driven, it’s nice to have these falls from Seth Rogen and other physical comedy shenanigans (like everything that happened to Ike Barinholtz’s Sal Saperstein in “The War”) interspersed throughout the stories.
The falls aren’t just about laughs either. Frida Perez added that they also help strengthen Matt Remick as a character, saying:
It's also just a funny character trait, I think. Yeah, Matt’s always bleeding or falling or tripping. It humanizes him a little bit too. It’s an endearing trait.
Well by that definition, Matt was certainly humanized in last week’s episode of The Studio, “The Pediatric Oncologist.” He broke his right pinkie finger while at a pediatric oncology gala and had to be taken to the hospital after passing out. On the other hand, Matt spent much of the episode arguing how his job as a head of a film studio was just as important as what doctors do, and tried to use Continental Studios’ Duhpocalypse!, which features “shitsploding” zombies, to make his case. So yeah, that offset the humanizing just a bit.
As for when Seth Rogen tripped on camera, Peter Huyck told me that came in the aforementioned Martin Scorsese episode, as the actor really did loose his footing as he was walking up some stairs. As the producer recalled:
One of the beats I like was when he finds out Scorsese's going to direct the Kool-Aid movie and he's running into the office, telling Quinn how excited he is, and he's going up the stairs. Seth Rogen actually slips and almost falls, and that was the take we used. ‘Cause he's [goes], ‘All these idiots who said I was a schmuck. Now they're gonna realize I'm a genius.’ And he's so excited. He's running up the stairs with Quinn and you see him miss a step and almost eat shit and then he keeps going. That's perfect Matt Remick right there.
Other shows might’ve used a take where Seth Rogen walked up the stairs just fine, but sometime there are unscripted opportunities that you just shouldn’t toss aside. Rogen quickly collected himself and completed the scene, so I absolutely agree with Peter Huyck that it was the right move to keep that take in. If only Matt had tempered his excitement in the moment a bit, because not only did the Scorsese-directed Kool-Aid movie not move forward, but he also refused to sell the director’s Jonestown script back to him, crushing his dream of that being his last movie.
New episodes of The Studio come out on Wednesdays, and while there’s no word yet on if Season 2 is in the cards, I’d like to think it stands a strong chance given how critically-acclaimed this show is. You can also hang around on Apple TV+ to watch Seth Rogen’s other original show for the platform, Platonic.
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