[Source: AP]

The studio head has historically been seen as a fearsome and all-powerful figure, capable of ending a career with the snap of a finger or changing lives with an impulsive greenlight. In “The Studio,” though, Seth Rogen’s studio chief is more Selina Meyer (“Veep”) than Louis B. Mayer.

As much as Rogen’s Matt Remick, head of the fictional Continental Studios, sits in a sought-after seat of power, he’s helpless against larger trends in the film industry. He wants to be making “Chinatown,” but instead his most important task is getting a Kool-Aid movie off the ground. Bryan Cranston’s Continental chief executive asks: Can he do this? “Oh, yeah!”

“As pitiful as it is, the conflict that my character lives and breathes every second of his life is one a lot of people with his job are facing in real life,” Rogen says. “They love movies. They’re also responsible to a very specific bottom line and they have to defend the choice they make to a board of people who don’t give a s— about movies.”

“The Studio,” the 10-episode series debuting Wednesday on Apple TV+, may be the definitive portrait of contemporary Hollywood. If movies like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Player” captured the movie industry in full swagger, “The Studio” belongs to a more desperate chapter where even the all-powerful feel impotent. Studio heads, too, must tolerate conversations with people who haven’t been to the movies in ages, but who loved “The Bear.”

In a recent interview, Rogen and Goldberg, the longtime writing, producing and directing duo behind “Superbad,” “Pineapple Express” and “This Is the End,” said “The Studio” isn’t quite a Hollywood postmortem, no matter how much Cranston’s performance in the helter-skelter CinemaCon-set finale verges toward “Weekend at Bernie’s” territory.

“We’re people who have been given great lives from this industry who, in general, though it’s been very frustrating, have gotten to do what they want,” Rogen says. “The show is very specifically written from the perspective of people that think things can work out in Hollywood.”

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