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Hollywood has a well-documented history of messing up projects before they even get in front of a camera. It could be a producer who rewrites a script into a version that barely resembles the one they bought in the first place or a studio that simply hires the wrong director, but the most commonly blamed aspect of filmmaking when it comes to pre-production has to be casting. Whether it’s Scarlett Johansson in Ghost In The Shell, Matt Damon in The Great Wall, or Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger, picking people that could be politely called problematic, especially across racial lines, has sunk many a blockbuster before a ticket could even be sold. (In fact, a controversy just broke this week.) The seventh episode of The Studio tackles casting controversies in a clever way, basically highlighting how easily power players like Matt Remick can spin out of control with questions they’re worried will have the wrong answer—to the point that they don’t realize they’re not asking the right questions in the first place.
The writers of The Studio bucked the pattern of standalone stories that have dominated this season, returning to the project from the series premiere about the Kool-Aid Man, which has now reached a truly tumultuous casting phase, one that Matt and his team are taking so seriously because they believe it could be “our Hamilton.” It’s an episode about how easily people like Matt can get high (or paranoid) on their own supply, reaching peaks of self-important delusion because a focus group likes a teaser trailer and then spiraling the other way into worrying that the backlash over the race of the voice of the Kool-Aid Man could get them fired and blacklisted. Hollywood executives have so much trouble living outside of the moment, responding only to the feedback in front of them instead of considering the bigger picture of what they liked about a project originally or what could happen on a set.
In this case, the cast of The Kool-Aid Movie! looks perfectly fine. Ice Cube and Sandra Oh are set to voice the animated leads with Josh Duhamel and Jessica Biel as the live-action leads. Matt is going to personally introduce Cube at an upcoming Comic-Con event, but Patty gets worried about a potential response to the casting. Is casting Ice Cube as the Kool-Aid Man insinuating that Black people like Kool-Aid more? Watching Matt, Sal, and Patty spin out is endlessly rewarding, especially Sal’s revelation that he knew something like this would end his career. It almost certainly will.
Quinn doesn’t help, suggesting that she never viewed Kool-Aid as a Black drink but more of a “poor person’s drink.” Yikes. The spiraling continues as the team goes to Tyler—who is on a photo shoot for a movie wonderfully titled Ain’t Your Mama—and he’s good with it, arguing that it would be more racist not to cast a Black actor as the iconic character. Guest stars Ziwe and Lil Rel Howery agree but they throw the team for a loop by asking if Gabrielle Union or Keke Palmer are voicing Mrs. Kool. Uh oh. It can’t be Sandra Oh? Maybe it could be Regina King? But now all the voice actors are minorities, and the live-action ones are not, so everyone has to be recast on that side too, maybe even with Don Cheadle. As so often happens on Hollywood productions, solving one non-problem creates an actual one that’s mishandled even more.
And it snowballs from there. They go to the writers to do a rewrite, and they understandably quit because they don’t think they have the right POV for what is now an entirely Black cast, leaving Nicholas Stoller (again playing himself) to do the rewrite himself in just five weeks. The only way he can do that is to have an AI company handle some of the animation. Uh oh.
After an amazing sequence in which they try to literally replicate the exact racial percentage of the country in their movie about Kool-Aid, Matt tries to take it back to the original question: Is it racist to have Ice Cube play the Kool-Aid Man? The only way to answer it is to ask the man himself. This is going to be wonderfully awkward. And it is. Cube is offended by the question. Of course the Kool-Aid Man is Black. Because Ice Cube is the Kool-Aid Man. End of sentence. And he’s going to join Matt onstage to make that clear.
The episode ends with that event as Ice Cube bursts onstage and everyone basks in the moment…for a few seconds. One of the audience members reveals that the story about the production now using AI has launched, pissing off even Ice Cube. As Stoller flees the scene, Matt hears the chants of “Fuck AI!” and aggressive boos rain down. Funnily enough, Sal and Patty don’t seem fazed in the wings, which is itself an interesting commentary. Problematic casting can sink an executive’s career, but AI may be here to stay.
Stray observations
- • So many names dropped in this episode that it’s hard to keep track of all of them. My favorites have to be when Matt implies Josh Gad is the go-to for a project that needs a stronger Jewish presence followed by Sal not knowing that Anya Taylor-Joy is Argentinean.
- • It’s an episode about how trying to fix one problem on a production creates a new one, and the line that captures that so well is when Matt says to the writers, “In an attempt to not be racist, you’re limiting the amount of Black people you can write for.” Kinda. Yeah.
- • I also loved Patty’s explanation for why the trailer hit so hard. It basically captures so much of what makes a hit nowadays: “A perfect storm of nostalgia, kitsch, irony, and stupidity.” You will see so many of those this summer.
- • A brief word of praise for the length of these episodes lately. This is another one coming in under 25 minutes, virtually unheard of in an era when so many episodes of television are longer than they need to be. The Studio is bringing back the art of the 24-minute comedy.
