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How do you give a creative note to an Oscar winner? The third episode of Apple TV+’s excellent series The Studio asks that question and continues the standard set by the two-episode premiere in a chapter that’s hysterical and layered. On the surface, it’s just an episode about an awkward executive having to give a critical note to one of his idols, a reminder that the people paying to make movies sometimes get nervous around famous people too. But it’s also about dueling traumas, one that comes from being ridiculed in a way that shaped Matt’s entire career and one from a personal loss that may be blinding a director from seeing the flaw in his vision. Overall, it’s a beautifully paced half hour of television, and an indication that this entire season might be pretty special.
“The Note” centers a quartet of characters introduced in the premiere as Matt and his three closest allies—Sal, Quinn, and Maya—open the episode with a screening of Ron Howard’s latest project, Alphabet City. It stars Anthony Mackie and Dave Franco in a period piece that looks like a gritty crime thriller for about two hours of its run time before it shifts into a dreamy drama about Mackie’s character coming to terms with his possibly dead son in a motel. The gang loves the first two acts and hates the third. After all, it has “no monsters or fights or Deadpools.”
Maya, who has to sell this turd of a movie, is the most vocal about giving Howard a note, even though he has final cut. They have to cut the entire motel sequence. They can’t even agree on what’s happening in it, and it’s going to sink the movie creatively and critically. No one seems as concerned as Matt. After all, Ron Howard is notoriously one of the nicest people in Hollywood. Or is he?
Enter Ron Howard himself, proving he’s lost none of his comic timing. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are clearly having some fun putting people in front of the camera who aren’t there very often and watching them destroy, following up Sarah Polley’s return to acting with a part for Howard, who basically just plays himself on TV (in This is Us and Only Murders In The Building, for example) but rules at it.
Matt doesn’t have the courage to give Howard the note, just saying a limp, “You rule, man.” He goes back to his team and tries to talk them out of it, but Quinn takes on the assignment. Illustrating the generation gap, Matt’s fawning over a star of Happy Days is echoed by Quinn’s adoration of a star of The Hurt Locker when Mackie joins the conversation. She goes fan girl—and nothing productive happens.
Enter Patty, kissing some butt with Howard before doing a great walk-and-talk with Matt, in which she reveals she hates the ending too, but it’s Matt who is going to have to fire this bullet. She also reveals that the reason Howard is so attached to it is that the whole sequence is about the director letting go of his cousin’s death. It’s closure through bad filmmaking. You see it all the time. But it’s not Patty’s problem anymore.
The quartet argues over the next move and comes to a bold conclusion: One of them is going to have to lie about having a dead cousin and then use that commonality to talk Howard out of making a bad movie. They argue over who has the lack of a moral center to fake a dead cousin, which leads to Matt revealing why he’s so scared of the Splash director in the first place. Years ago, Matt was invited to a friends-and-family screening of A Beautiful Mind, where the young man—and based on Rogen’s real age, he must have been a teenager—got the nerve to tell Howard that he should give away that Paul Bettany’s character was imaginary before the twist ending. Howard roasted him in front of the likes of Joel Coen and Steven Soderbergh. He hasn’t yet realized that this Matt is that Matt. Sal is going to have to initiate Operation Fake Dead Cousin.
Barinholtz is amazing as Sal tries to fake a story about his cousin Ronaldo Saperstein, but it backfires in that it makes Ron Howard even more emotionally committed to the bit. And then Anthony Mackie (who is phenomenal in this episode, the best he’s been in anything in years) reveals that even he hates the ending.
After a marketing meeting in which it looks like Howard wants to use the motel sequence that the studio wants to cut in the film’s marketing, everything hits the fan. Matt finally starts to broach the subject when Howard goes on a full assault, revealing that he does remember the note that made Joel Coen “chuckle his fucking titties off” and then just straight roasting Matt. Should they have spoiled The Sixth Sense mid-movie? Fight Club? Finally, Matt has had enough, and he tells him that the third act of Alphabet City is just boring, leading to Ron Howard literally throwing his hat at him. It’s an amazing ending.
The coda rules too as Matt walks the streets in a melancholy daze that echoes the one in Alphabet City. Ron Howard calls to reveal that they’re going to do the right thing for the movie, but he leaves Matt with a warning: “Cross me again, I’ll fucking destroy you.”
Don’t piss off Opie.
Stray observations
- • Speaking of Opie, did anyone else see this crazy reveal that Ron Howard discovered that he was actually distant cousins with his Andy Griffith Show co-star Don Knotts? It’s a weird world.
- • I love that the Australian chess script that Patty wants Matt to read is called Check Mate because one can totally picture a Hallmark-y movie with that title. G’day, mate.
- • Do people use the word “delulu” as a short for delusional like Maya does in this episode? Gonna start doing that.
- • The great opening needle drop to Alphabet City is “Long Black Road” by ELO, which was also used memorably in American Hustle. And “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot plays more than once.
- • Guest Cameo Tally: This one has Ron Howard and Anthony Mackie playing themselves, along with Dave Franco in the film within a film. It’s a great trio on a show that everyone clearly wanted to be a part of.
