Inside ‘The Studio’ - The Showrunners Peter Huyck and Frida Perez On Making "A Sexy Version Of ‘The Office’" [Interview]

Apple TV+'s latest comedy series The Studio follows Matt Remick, the head of the fictional Continental Studios. Set in the heart of Hollywood, the show offers an unfiltered look at life behind the scenes. Instead of relying on made-up celebrities, it features real actors, directors, and producers playing fictionalized versions of themselves. The series is funny, witty, and a refreshing take on the workplace comedy.

Nexus Point News talked to The Studio creators, co-showrunners, EPs and writers Frida Perez and Peter Huyck about the making of the series.

Demet: The Studio could have easily become just another industry for cameo field playground, but it never does. What were the internal rules or boundaries you set to keep it grounded?

Peter Huyck: Well, I think when we first came up with the show, the idea was that it really had to work as an ensemble comedy and you couldn't live on the celebrity cameos. You had to care about the characters, they had to care about each other, have interesting dynamics. I think the line we used when we were pitching the show was for us, we see it not as a less sexy version of Entourage, but a more sexy version of The Office. The show lives and dies, it's a workplace comedy, and that's why it's kind of relatable to anyone's watching at home because it's a boss, he's got these employees, you go to conference rooms, you're worried about budgets and you have meetings. It's about Hollywood in a way, and you have great cameos and fun. But really at the end of the day, it's just a classic workplace comedy.

Frida Perez: I think he covered, I think that was solid. (Laughs) Thanks! Honestly, that was great.

Demet: The show is about Hollywood, made by people in Hollywood, so was there anything you were told to cut, soften or just avoid entirely?

Frida: I don't think so actually.

Peter: That's a very good question. I would say what one interesting thing and it exists everywhere, certainly with Apple: There's no smoking of cigarettes. So you do not smoke cigarettes. There's no nicotine. You can have people doing piles of cocaine, they can eat chocolate mushrooms, you can drink until you fall down, but you cannot show cigarettes being smoked. So that is a rule that I think exists almost in all media these days, but it's always interesting. Now when you see someone smoke on TV in a movie, it's almost shocking. It's almost a surprise more than anything. So that's like one of the first rules that is is laid out in front of you.

Frida: But in terms of like plot or like things about Hollywood that I don't think anybody told us like "Don't go there," I don't know. I think if anything, there seemed to be like a cathartic hope for the show that we would talk about the things that everybody in the industry deals with every day. You just wanna get it off your chest and you love the industry, it's really interesting and fun and exciting, but it can also be really frustrating and difficult. We wanted to express those frustrations and kind of like give everybody an avenue to laugh at it and laugh at our silly jobs — silly and wonderful jobs.

Peter: Yeah, and I would say, since our leaders are Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg], they're the types of people who if you told them you can't touch an area, they would then immediately want to. They are not afraid to push. They love pushing boundaries and doing anything. So I think everyone knows going into this, if you're doing a comedy with Seth and Evan, you can't really then say "but don't touch, these areas are off limits" because they'll say, "well, we're gonna go there, it's gonna happen."

Demet: That's very insightful. Every episode feels like a high stakes pressure cooker. What was the writer's room like when mapping out these controlled implosions?

Frida: Pretty chill, honestly.

Peter: It isn't surprising because there's only 5 of us, which is a smaller writer's room. On the last show Veep, there were 12 people in the room and 12 writers on sets. You would go to the monitors and watching every take where 12 writers shouting out jokes. In this case, there were 5 of us who are writers and 2 of those are directors as well. So it was a kind of a smaller, more intimate process and also we did a lot of time in in writers' rooms and in conference rooms. We also were always corresponding by a giant text chain that that was kind of this living, breathing, creative entity. So you would go to a dinner and you're not like on your phone, then you'd walk out at 10 p.m. and see you'd missed 200 messages from Frida, Alex [Gregory], Seth and Evan because someone had an idea for an episode. You text it, someone jumps on it, someone pitches a joke, someone adds a clip of something and a picture of something... So that for 2 years, it was just almost 24/7 that we were generating ideas. There were so many things about creating the show that we were excited about.

Frida: Yeah, it was also really nice having Seth and Evan as directors in the room and the directing style is obviously so specific, so we were able to do that parallel path rather than write a script, then give it to director and the director changes it up completely. We were really thinking with Seth and Evan the whole time.

Peter: It's a thing that you see with them, and I haven't seen this level of genius, truly, since Garry Shandling. You're in a writers' room, you're breaking down an episode or a scene, and then Seth takes the keyboard, starts talking and it's almost like he's seeing it in his head. He's seeing how he's gonna act it, how they're gonna direct it, how the moment has to feel... You'll see it comes out of them, it's so impressive and it's so exciting to be a part of it. It really is a very special moment in life to see these guys be in that zone.

Demet: It looks special, so it's nice that it's special behind the scenes too. It lines up with the way the show is.

Peter: Oh, it's pure magic! I cannot tell you how much fun we have. There's a lot of panic on the show, and it's a stressful job, but it's also the funniest group of people creating a comedy that we all love, so it is just a joyful job.

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Demet: Visually, the show feels incredibly ambitious. Can you talk about the one take style and how it shaped the rhythm of the episodes?

Peter: I think that was right from the start and very much Seth and Evan as directors had this notion, but all five of us writing it, the scenes had to have pressure, stakes and tension because in Hollywood, you have these moments where you think, "Oh, I have half an hour to write a scene and it's either gonna make or break my entire career. And if I hand over these pages and they're not up to snuff, then I'm gonna be humiliated." So everything is life and death. Every moment, every time you're meeting a director for the first time, you say the right thing, you say the wrong thing, they might direct your movie, you might never have another meeting... So we want to infuse the show with that sense of stress and panic, and that's why the single takes. It doesn't give you time to breathe. There's no cuts... We wanted every episode to really have as much as tight time frame. You've got an hour or half an hour, you've got a day, you've got maybe 2 days.... but really, we wanted to capture that sense of stress we all feel in the industry that we're all supposed to be creating and having fun, but underneath it, we're all very stressed out people where the stakes of every interaction are very high.

Frida: Yeah, and I think also like creating such a hard rule, it also just gave it a distinct look and feel. We shot the show on one lens and basically every scene is shot in one shot. So those two elements kind of built out the entire feel and look of the show, and it gave it a really distinct vision. I was super excited for once I heard it, cause it just immediately stands out a little bit, which is cool cause there's so much stuff out there. There's so many TV shows and how do you make it feel different and feel new and exciting and I thought that was very smart of Seth and Evan.

Peter: I think also a part of our creative team. And with the five of us was Adam Newport-Berra, who was our cinematographer, and our camera operator, Mark, who he's built like a superhero. He's unbelievable, and he would be a part of every scene because he had a note. There's no cuts, you're not just doing a wide and then a tight. He literally lives with the dialogue, so he memorizes every word of dialogue, and he has to be right in the moment, never ahead of it, never behind it. And if you change a line, you have to go tell not just Adam, the cinematographer and his whole team, but your camera operator Mark because he needs to know. He is running backwards at full speed with a camera with someone steering him, and if something changes, he needs to know every second of every scene. So I think that's an interesting thing I've never seen for 30 years of writing TV shows. I've never been that involved with that element and the other element that was fascinating.

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From a production standpoint, our editor, Eric Kissack, is at the monitors with us as well, because he's live editing. These are one takes, these are oners, so you don't have an opportunity later to say, "Well, we threw in a few extra jokes. If we don't like it, we can just cut around it." You can't. And so our editor Eric would be there with us and we would all turn to him. It would be all of us; the writer, producers, the monitors and say, "Eric, what do you think?" He says, "I'd love to cut those two lines in the middle, do a take because I'm gonna want to pull it out later and I'm not gonna be able to." So we would run a whole new take, you have to reset it and kind of redesign the scene so that it would work. So that's another element if you get a chance to talk to Eric Kissack, our editor, he was brilliant and he basically was live editing the show, and that's the thing I've never seen anyone do.

Demet: Yeah, that sounds insanely intense!

Peter: It was wild. It was amazing. It was fun.

Demet: And one last question, is there a director or an actor you haven't had yet that you'd love to bring into this show?

Frida: So many.

Peter: The list is endless, because all in season one we were talking about, "We'd love to get Tarantino, we'd love to get Spielberg, we'd love to get Brad Pitt." Hopefully we get a second season and a third, a fourth, and a fifthth and a tenth. This feels like a show that has a lot of of runway and there's so many great stories to tell and guest actors and actors and directors and musicians and people that we would love to work with.

Frida: Yeah. It's very hypothetical, but now that people know what it is, hopefully we can get more fun people.

Demet: Yeah, hopefully we can get more seasons!

The Studio is now streaming on Apple TV+.

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This interview has been edited for clarity.