Be careful what you wish for.
That appears to be the message behind Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez's Apple TV+ sitcom 'The Studio'.
A 10 part comedy of errors, it stars Rogen as Matt Remick, a film buff turned Hollywood exec who finds himself ascending to the throne at a fictional studio after Bryan Cranston's CEO Griffin Mill decides to axe its head Catherine O'Hara's Patty Leigh.
Stunned yet pleased to be replacing his mentor, Matt embarks on the new role with zeak, vowing to turn Continental Studios into an entertainment conglomerate that makes the sort of quality films that Hollywood is no longer known for.
However accepting the job comes at a price, with Matt agreeing to Griffin's demand that he greenlight a lame franchise movie about the Kool Aid Man.
Initially encouraged by his colleagues to hire Nicholas Stoller of 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' fame as its director, he quickly changes his mind when he hears Martin Scorsese is available.
Seduced by the idea of Scorsese directing a film not about Kool Aid but about the Jonestown Massacre, Remick decides to option it until his colleagues, Ike Baronholtz's vice president of production Sal Saperstein and Kathryn Hahn's head of marketing Maya Mason convince him it's a terrible idea because it is not the movie that Griffin wants.
Firing Scorsese is the first in a series of transgressions that Matt will make as a studio head.
Subsequent episodes see him ruining an ambitious one take sequence in the new Sarah Polley movie, falling foul of Ron Howard over the self indulgent ending of his new thriller with Anthony Mackie, clashing with Olivia Wilde over missing footage in her film which stars Zac Efron and tying himself up in knots over whether the casting of Ice Cube as the Kool Aid Man might be considered racist.
Intelligently written, ambitiously directed and superbly acted, each episode of 'The Studio' is an affectionate nod to Robert Altman's razor sharp 1992 Hollywood satire 'The Player'.
The series shares Altman's mischievous humour and its technical bravura, with Adam Newport-Berra's daring cinematography on a par with Jean Lepine's dazzling work in the 1992 movie.
It's also star studded and full of knowing gags about the industry.
Hell, even Bryan Cranston's character shares the same name as Tim Robbins' unscrupulous Hollywood studio exec in Altman's movie.
Rogen is superb as the constantly hassled and jelly spined studio head.
Hahn, Baronholtz and Chase Sui Wonders, who plays Matt's former assistant turned junior executive Quinn Hackett, also prove great comic foils.
Each character, like Matt, wobbles, backstabs and panics and lacks moral backbone.
O'Hara and Cranston are, as you'd expect, excellent team players - a drug fuelled episode at a cinema con in Las Vegas providing their best moment
Like Altman's film, the show is peppered with self deprecating cameos from the likes of Scorsese, Steve Buscemi, Charlize Theron, Polly, Howard, Mackie, Wilde, Efron, Ice Cube, Johnny Knoxville, Josh Hutcherson, Zoe Kravitz, Dave Franco, Paul Dano, Peter Berg, Ted Sandaros and Aaron Sorkin.
Other highlights include a wonderful episode fashioned around the Golden Globes and another where Matt accompanies his oncologist girlfriend Rebecca Hall's Sarah to a lavish fundraising dinner and ends up getting wound up by her arrogant fellow medics.
Matt gets so annoyed, he gets into a bidding war with them in a charity auction over a prized round of golf in the highly regarded Royal County Down links in Northern Ireland.
The laughs come thick and fast in this superb show.
And that's exactly what you want from a comedy like this,.
Unsurprisingly, Apple have already announced a second outing.
Expect the show to also compete at various award ceremonies.
(Season One of 'The Studio's was made available on Apple TV+ between March 26-May 21, 2025)
There have been many examples of authorities making catastrophic blunders and then closing their ranks to deny reality.
But the 2005 shooting by police in London of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground is so memorable because the events were so shocking.
A case of mistaken identity, the horrific incident was compounded by the Metropolitan Police's hamfisted efforts to spin a story about the killing.
In 'Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes,' writer Jeff Pope and director Paul Andrew Williams shine a particularly unforgiving light on how senior Met Police chiefs attempted to dodge admitting their mistake.
Fuelled by genuine outrage, Disney+'s drama never lets its anger engulf how it depicts events.
Instead the four part show takes its time to carefully explain the context of the shooting in Stockwell tube station.
It's a smart decision.
Beginning with the suicide bombings that killed 52 people two weeks earlier, it also dramatises the second wave of botched bomb attacks by Islamic extremists on buses and trains the day before de Menezes was gunned down.
In Pope's carefully constructed drama, Daniel Mays' forensics expert Cliff Todd is seen meticulously picking his way through the debris after the first and second waves of attacks.
We witness Conleth Hill's Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair rushing in front of the cameras after the first set of bombings to react to the atrocities while Max Beasley's Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman and intelligence chiefs dispute the facts at a British Government led emergency COBRA meeting.
We follow the Islamic extremist gang behind the second wave of attacks - played by Lee Ali, Liban Adan, Wakjira Fayesa, Ebenezer Gayu and Zak Nur - as they plan their suicide bombings, only for the devices to fail to detonate.
We're subsequently plunged into a manhunt for the gang, with an undercover police unit being informed that they may have to shoot the suspects on sight.
James Nelson Joyce's Charlie 2 and Tom Durant Pritchard's Charlie 12 are so pumped up to use deadly force, they're chomping at the bit as they pursue Edison Alcaide's Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station when he is wrongly identified as a member of the gang.
Pope also takes time to depict the Brazilian's life in London as a hardworking electrician planning a return to his native land.
Doing so only amplifies the sense of tragedy.
After all this painstaking detail, the show goes up several gears when it recreates the shocking slaying of de Menezes in front of other tube passengers.
His killing is swift and brutal and as the audience recovers from the speed and savagery of the incident, 'Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes' settles into the mould of a miscarriage of justice that drama rages with indignation at the reluctance of senior police officers to admit their blunder.
Conleth Hill's Sir Ian Blair comes off the worst, with the Northern Irish actor playing him as a pompous man who is too preoccupied with protecting the image of the police and himself.
The depiction of Emily Mortimer's Commander Cressida Dick, who oversaw the police operation, is equally damning.
A future Metropolitan Police Commissioner, she is portrayed as a senior officer who loses control of the surveillance operation but then refuses to acknowledge at de Menezes' inquest the police's mistake.
While Russell Tovey's Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick is troubled by Blair and other senior officers' behaviour, the hero of the drama is Laura Aikman's Independent Police Complaints Commission employee Lana Bandenberghe who is so appalled by the Met Police's covering of its tracks that she leaks details of the investigation into the police's operation to ITN.
These reveal the Met leadership were peddling a narrative about de Menezes that they knew was a distortion of reality.
'Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes' is a gripping watch, thanks to Pope's sharp writing and Williams' pacy but focused direction.
As for the cast, Hill, Aikman, Ali, Adan, Fayesa, Gayu, Nur, Tovey, Mortimer, Nelson-Joyce, Durant-Pritchard, Beasley, Mays and Alcaide all shine alongside Izuka Hoyle as a friend of Bandenberghe and Alex Jennings as the barrister Michael Mansfield.
The show is British TV at its focused best but it's yet another case this year of a show delivered on a streaming service that you might have expected to wind up on BBC1 or ITV.
Regardless of where it has landed, it's an important show because of the issues it airs.
But as important as the show is, we're left asking the same question as other dramas - have the lessons been learned?
(Episodes of 'Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes' were made available for streaming in the UK and Ireland on April 30, 2025)
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