[This story contains some spoilers for the first two episodes of The Studio on Apple TV+.]

The idea of a movie studio considering a film based on Kool-Aid — the sugary drink with an anthropomorphic pitcher as logo — sounds just plausible in the current IP-obsessed era of the entertainment business. It’s also just crazy enough to be the inciting incident of Apple TV+’s Hollywood satire The Studio.

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The series opener, written by creators Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Alex Gregory, Peter Huyck and Frida Perez, finds movie executive Matt Remick (Rogen) elevated to the head of the fictional Continental Studios after his predecessor, Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara, whose character, Rogen has said in interviews, is inspired by former Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal), is ousted following a string of flops. Matt professes over and over to be a cinephile who really, really wants to make great films, but he only gets the top job after assuring his CEO (played by Bryan Cranston) that he’ll make the Kool-Aid movie.

The Studio doesn’t suggest that Matt has necessarily failed upward into his job — he notes that he developed what became Continental’s biggest recent franchise — but it strongly implies he’s in a no-win situation. “I got into this business because I love movies,” he tells Patty, “but now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them.”

Here are a few takeaways from the opening two episodes of The Studio:

There are LOTS of cameos: The show opens with the filming of a Continental movie, with Paul Dano acting out a deadly fight scene while director Peter Berg looks on. They’re among the first faces viewers see in The Studio, well before Rogen’s Matt first appears on screen.

Filmmaker Nicholas Stoller guests as the would-be director of Kool-Aid (and whose pitch for the film, frankly, also sounds like something that would get made); he’s worked with Rogen several times, notably on Apple’s series Platonic and the Neighbors movies. The episode turns, though, on Martin Scorsese, who pitches Matt on an epic about the Jonestown massacre — which Matt, high on the idea of both greenlighting a Scorsese film and thinking he can make that his Kool-Aid movie, impulsively buys, only to be brought back to earth after by his head of marketing (an amped-up Kathryn Hahn).

Charlize Theron (Rogen’s Long Shot co-star) and Steve Buscemi, whom Scorsese had tapped to star in his film, make appearances at a party where Matt has to tell Scorsese that his Jonestown movie isn’t happening, and the $10 million he promised for the script is to kill the film. As Scorsese sobs in the background, Theron delivers her one line (“Get the fuck out of here”) and Buscemi, not knowing what just transpired, greets Matt warmly and tells him what an honor it is to work with him on what will be Scorsese’s last film. Ouch.

The second episode features guest turns from Sarah Polley and Greta Lee as the director and star of a prestige movie Continental is making (more on that below), and there are many more cameos to come over the course of the season.

About that CEO: Cranston’s character is named Griffin Mill, which is at the very least an affectionate nod to The Player, the Robert Altman-directed 1992 Hollywood send-up that starred Tim Robbins as an ambitious studio exec named … Griffin Mill. It’s likely an homage, as Cranston’s character cuts a very different figure from Robbins’ buttoned-down, power-suited executive. But it’s also a lot of fun to think about that Griffin Mill clawing his way up to the top of the Hollywood power structure and becoming a mustachioed CEO with a penchant for turtlenecks and statement jewelry — an image that calls to mind real-life show business legend Robert Evans (O’Hara’s Patty refers to Cranston’s character as a “dime store Bob Evans” at one point).

The Veep DNA is strong: Co-creators Gregory and Huyck were writers and executive producers of the Emmy-winning HBO comedy, and The Studio shares with it an idea that the often perverse incentives of its environment — the entertainment business here, politics in Veep — can turn even the most well-meaning person into everything they (self-) loathe.

In its first two episodes, The Studio doesn’t (yet) have the ear for florid profanity that Veep did. But when Patty tells Matt’s friend and fellow Continental exec Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), “You’re not as dumb as you look, which is not saying much considering how dumb you look,” it’s not hard to imagine Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) delivering that line to one of her aides on Veep. (Gregory and Huyck also worked on The Larry Sanders Show, which also skewered the entertainment business to great effect.)

Rogen and Goldberg love a tracking shot: Episode two is called “The Oner,” and it’s both about Polley trying to capture a long, single-take shot that’s the climax of her film and shot in what appears to be one continuous, 25-minute take; if there are stealth cuts, they’re well disguised. It’s not just that episode, though: There are several long tracking shots in the premiere (as well as in upcoming episodes). Rogen and Goldberg directed all 10 episodes of The Studio, and the tracking shot is maybe the show’s most prominent visual signature. Their love of long takes could also be seen as an homage to The Player, which famously opens with an eight-minute tracking shot during which a couple of characters discuss another famous oner from Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.

Martin Scorsese has great comic timing: That’s perhaps not a revelation, as Scorsese has showed comic chops in everything from talk show interviews to prior cameos as himself to the TikTok videos he makes with his daughter Francesca. The Studio puts that to great use, though, in a scene in the premiere that almost feels lifted from an episode of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

As Matt and Sal try to find ways not to tell Scorsese his Jonestown movie is a no-go, the director calls them out for being inauthentic.

“I saw that look — it’s a furtive look. It was furtive,” Scorsese says.

“We were not being furtive,” Matt protests.

“Oh no, that’s furtive,” Scorsese shoots back. “I know furtive. If there’s one thing I know, it’s furtive, OK?”

Though the scene ends with Scorsese crying after Matt says the filmmaker can’t have his script back, Scorsese gets in one more shot before that — one that also name-checks the place where people are watching The Studio: “Just give me back my movie, and let me go sell it to fucking Apple like I should’ve done in the first place.”

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