Televising Decline

Elizabeth Alsop reviews “The Studio,” “The Franchise,” and other recent industry satires.

By Elizabeth AlsopAugust 17, 2025

• Television

• Film

This essay is part of the Screen Shots series, fresh takes from LARB’s own film and TV team.

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EARLY IN HBO’s The Franchise (2024), Dag, the third assistant director of the show’s fictional production, Tecto: Eye of the Storm, confronts the first AD in his office. They’ve just spent the day trying—and failing—to shoot a stunt featuring a notably lame piece of superhero equipment: an invisible jackhammer. “Have you ever thought, ‘Am I killing cinema?’” Dag (Lolly Adefope) asks, trying to gauge how her boss really feels about farming out his talents to a sub-MCU-style sequel. “What if this isn’t a dream factory? What if it’s an abattoir?”

This flip cine-fatalism is characteristic of The Franchise, a blistering backstage satire of contemporary Hollywood. Over the course of its eight episodes, the series offers an unambiguously strong theory about what ails the industry—too much corporate oversight, too little concern with anything but profits—and commits to a relentlessly declinist narrative of commercial filmmaking. In The Franchise, creeping sequelization is just a morbid symptom of a too-late capitalist logic that forces even well-intentioned creatives to work at crazy-making paces (sometimes literally). The result, as we see in Tecto’s case, is far less than the sum of its digitally enhanced parts. Forget the genius of the system; today’s studios, The Franchise suggests, are barely sentient.

The Franchise is hardly the only recent series to take such a dim view of Movies These Days. Earlier this spring, Apple TV+ debuted The Studio, an only somewhat less cynical take on the industry, this time from the vantage point not of underpaid grunts but of the company’s chief executive. If The Studio’s critique is tempered by the jovial presence of Seth Rogen and his character’s earnest cinephilia—he really just wants to make good movies, guys!—these good intentions are no match for the bottom-line thinking espoused by the Continental Studios CEO, who in the pilot tasks Rogen, the incoming studio head, with making a Barbie-sized hit out of their newly acquired IP, Kool-Aid. The message is clear: if you want to make it in the biz today, you’re going to have to drink the you-know-what.

But more interesting than the joint appearance of these two industry satires—a convergence that itself points to streaming platforms’ investment in synergistic logics—is that a similar line of declinist critique has surfaced in a surprising range of recent series. Alongside the full-frontal attacks offered by The Studio and The Franchise, comedies as varied as Fantasmas (2024) and Only Murders in the Building (in its most recent season, from last year) have taken the hollowing-out of Hollywood as a through line. Meanwhile, prestige dramas of the past few years like Sugar (2024– ) and Irma Vep (2022) approach the problem of industry decline from a different, more melancholic angle—celebrating the cinema that was, to dramatize the constrained horizons of filmmaking today.

On the one hand, these shows might just seem to comprise two sides of the same cine-pessimistic coin, and to offer a shared thesis: that filmmaking, the seventh art, is now—at least in its mainstream variants—where artistry goes to die. But looked at from another angle, these series might be accused of misdirection. If The Studio and The Franchise take aim at the political economy of a film industry that has largely ceased to care about quality, it’s not as if the streamers themselves haven’t demonstrated an indifference to whether audiences are even watching, or whether what they’re producing is more than Mid. (Notwithstanding Apple TV+’s attempt at counterprogramming, with series like Lessons in Chemistry and The Morning Show, which—as Michael Szalay and Anna Shechtman point out—seem designed not only to burnish the brand but also to promote a heroic vision of broadcast television.)

Hollywood, of course, has always embraced opportunities to regard its own operations; the showbiz satire is hardly new. But at a moment when the film and television industries are facing nothing less than what Daniel Bessner calls an “existential threat”—in the form of intensified conglomeration, AI proliferation, and “postapocalyptic” labor conditions—TV writers seem to be registering the fact that the two mediums have reached a new and depressing level of convergence.

With this new wave of industry-focused series, then, television may be processing the prospect of not just filmmaking’s decline, but its own as well. Even as these shows narrate cinema’s downward trajectory, it’s not a stretch to suggest they’re allegorizing TV’s similar collapse of creative ambition, its documented slide into “trough” territory. In an era when the medium is self-consciously post-Peak—at once disappointing and about disappointment, as Phillip Maciak has argued—this focus on filmmaking’s failures starts to feel like projection: TV, protesting a bit too much.

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Of these declinist satires, The Franchise is the most nihilistic about Hollywood’s future—unsurprising, given that it was co-produced by Armando Iannucci, best known for his caustic brand of institutional critique (Veep, In the Loop). Dag may serve as the show’s conscience, but hers is just one among a chorus of voices decrying the growing divide between “actual movies” and “franchise bullshit.” Anita (Aya Cash), Tecto’s mercenary producer, describes the film as a “a refugee camp for displaced IP,” while first AD Daniel (Himesh Patel), fluent in Ianucci-ese, calls it a “middling fucking plank of a movie.” Even the boorish studio bro has an analysis: “Seems we gave the fans too much content, and they choked on it.”

Occasionally, the camera will crane up, offering an aerial shot of the set, or we’ll see a brief interstitial title card (“Day 35 of 117”) that facetiously recalls the far more exciting countdown of a network procedural like 24. But mostly, The Franchise feels claustrophobic, barely allowing viewers beyond the radius of the studio lot. As the series progresses, the action retreats into smaller, more cramped spaces—a star’s trailer, a makeshift office, a dark corner of an airplane hangar—as if to convey the sense of diminished creative possibility.

At times, The Franchise seems to want to shrug off irony and deliver a sincere cri de coeur on behalf of cinema. “I just want this to be a good film, smart people working hard,” Daniel says quietly, and Anita nods: “I think we all want that.” But if The Franchise crew avoids the worst outcomes, Daniel’s “happy” ending is that he may yet direct his own superhero film. In the finale, we learn that Tecto has been elevated from studio chum to “summer tentpole.” But the real question, by this point, is how long you can keep propping up the tent—or why anyone would want to.

The Studio, for its part, offers a less totalizing condemnation of its subject, and a more ebullient celebration of its potential. (As Slate critic Dana Stevens wrote upon its release, “Finally, a streaming TV show for cinephiles!”) Continental exec Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) is the show’s primary delivery system for this dose of cine-optimism, but he is encouraged in his faith—his love of “artsy-fartsy filmmaking bullshit”—by others in the ensemble, including Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders), a film-school alum and A24 enthusiast, and Patty (Catherine O’Hara), Continental’s prickly but principled former studio chief.

Matt’s True Believer credentials are routinely undermined by his capitulation to the bottom line or by his crew of commercially minded capos (including Kathryn Hahn as a marketing executive guided by pure populism, who says things like “I can’t sell this never-ending snory”). But along the way, his cinephilic impulses give the show cover to indulge its own aesthetic ambitions—notably, in its second episode, “The Oner,” which is both about Matt’s attempt to micromanage a single continuous take and itself a bravura example of the technique.

With references to the Safdie brothers and cameos from luminaries such as Martin Scorsese, the show is almost as adulatory as it is scathing, and its characters, unlike the defeated crew of The Franchise, remain goofily sentimental about cinema. “Isn’t film just magical?” Matt enthuses during a screening. “Film’s a fucking pain in my ass,” the projectionist responds. In another episode, Matt suggests that “just because we did bad doesn’t mean we can’t still do some good,” a line that captures something of the show’s upbeat ethos. While the finale flirts with realism, by suggesting that Continental risks corporate takeover by a tech company (“They’re going to MGM us?” Patty exclaims), it ends by affirming there is still space for well-meaning folks to, at the very least, squeak by.

But if The Studio is ultimately a cheerier iteration of The Franchise, both are driving home the same message: movies, as we know them, are in danger. There may be no better image to embody the idea that Hollywood is on life support than a set-piece in The Studio’s finale, in which Continental employees are tasked with propping up the studio’s drugged CEO (Bryan Cranston), Weekend at Bernie’s–style, through CinemaCon.

Both shows are sharp, smart, and very funny; they land their punches. Then again, they’ve picked easy targets: the Studio and the Franchise. The resulting critiques have something of an air of a foregone conclusion, a whiff of fatalism that is commensurate with comedy, but also a kind of conservatism. Forget it, Matt: it’s Hollywood. In his 2022 book The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits, Jed Esty points out that such declinist thinking is in fact a “conservative rhetoric”—one that necessarily looks back to some prior era of supposed greatness. But in relinquishing the myth of once-and-future supremacy, Esty suggests, there’s new opportunity: not to resurrect a status quo, but to envision alternatives.

To its credit, The Studio does acknowledge how regressive its characters’ recourse to nostalgia can be. In the season’s penultimate episode, Matt serves some of the studio’s A-listers an “old-school Hollywood buffet.” The only problem? No one knows what that means, or that the “buffet” in question is just a bunch of psychedelics, on which his celebrity guests unwittingly overdose.

At some point, narratives of decline can actually override evidence to the contrary—the fact that movies, for all the naysaying, are still doing numbers. “We are not even six months into 2025, and movies have made $5.719 billion. The total for all of 2024 was $8.872 billion,” film critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote on Bluesky. “But yeah, sure, cinema is dying.”

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Other recent series haven’t been marked as showbiz satires, but they satirize just the same. Fantasmas, Julio Torres’s surrealist mood board of a show, filters its swipes at 21st-century Hollywood through a candy-colored lens, but their far-outness lends his observations a sociological edge. Like his autofictional film Problemista (2023), Fantasmas treats the culture industry as an object of both curiosity and negative cathexis. Here, Julio (Torres, as himself) is an artist whose main antagonist is a thoroughly homogenized media landscape; the show unfolds in a fun-house version of New York, fully captured by technocapitalism. In the fourth episode, as Julio contemplates taking a gig as “the first queer, five-eight Latinx superhero on a straight-to-streaming series,” we flash sideways, to an interpolated story about the soul-deadening effects of franchise fandom. When that gig falls through, he overrides his scruples to pitch a TV series, “How I Came Out to My Abuela,” to a predatory executive (Natasha Lyonne) eager to extract his pain for profit: “Give us your trauma, give it to us funny, give it to us en español, por favor!”

Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas’s 2022 limited series adaptation of his 1996 film of the same name, is far droller—that is to say, more French—in its commentary on Hollywood’s crumbling hegemon. In the pilot, A-list star Mira (Alicia Vikander), exhausted by the demands of the superhero industrial complex, decamps to Paris to work with a shambolic French auteur—and presumed Assayas stand-in, René (Vincent Macaigne)—on a serialized adaptation of his film Irma Vep, itself a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915–16 serial Les Vampires. The plot focuses on the show’s production, but there is plenty of space across its eight languid episodes for characters to debate the fate of filmmaking in a world obsessed “industrial entertainment ruled by algorithms.” As if to affirm cinema’s lapsed potential, Irma Vep takes the unusual step of cutting in clips—footage from Assayas’s and Feuillade’s original work, as well as simulated sequences from the remake in progress.

A similarly nostalgic impulse animates Apple TV+’s Sugar, a noir-saturated series set in Los Angeles, which was recently renewed for a second season. The show’s protagonist, John Sugar (Colin Farrell), is a detective and devoted film-lover, whose main client is a legendary Hollywood producer with a family dilemma that recalls The Big Sleep by way of Chinatown. (His son, as it happens, is also a producer, just a much lesser one, whose credits include such made-up features as Cop vs. Cop and Mr. Mayhem.) As with Irma Vep, the show’s biggest gambit—apart from a very polarizing late-season reveal—is its practice of splicing in film clips, mostly from noirs like Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). One effect of this is that the show turns into a running Letterboxd list of classic Hollywood cinema, with fans assembling actual lists of the films referenced. (Letterboxd itself later published an interview with the show’s writer and creator, Mark Protosevich.)

Sugar, of course, is only the latest in a long line of small-screen cinephiles, characters—from Tony Soprano and Don Draper to Jimmy McGill—whose love of movies has emerged as something of a trope within prestige TV. But unlike its Golden Age predecessors, Sugar is one of a glut of theoretically interchangeable Apple products. In this context, the series’ cinema-coding hits differently. What might have once served as a shorthand for characterological depth—or a showrunner’s bona fides—now feels a little bit sad. Like Norma Desmond, cueing up silent films in her crumbling manse, there’s something poignant about a digital streamer’s invocation of an earlier Hollywood, one that predates the rise of “content.” That Sugar is itself somewhat forgettable, in the manner of so many Apple TV+ shows, only makes the series’ devotion to the indelibility of certain images more haunting: reminding us that the movies we love might, in an intensely volatile streaming environment, simply—and at any moment—disappear.

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In this age of algorithms, AI slop, and platform instability, it makes sense that television writers might be moved to celebrate human artistry—or lament its decline. At the time of Sugar’s premiere last year, Paramount joined the long list of streamers purging content from its archives. The next month, Apple ran a commercial for another of its products, the new iPad, that seemed to envision its sleek new technology literally crushing various implements of analog creativity: a record player, a movie camera, a guitar.

If satire feels like a natural response to such a bleak set of circumstances, resistance might also take other forms. Like Colin Farrell’s deliberately stylized voice-over narration, Sugar’s sixth-episode twist—that the character is (spoiler alert) actually an alien from another planet—is a creative big swing, and one that skirts silliness. But however you feel about that experiment, it is at least partly redeemed by being so idiosyncratic, so weirdly human. Writing about the series Mrs. Davis, for instance, James Poniewozik argued, in a mixed review, that one major point in the show’s favor was that ChatGPT could never. “For better or worse, an A.I. could not come up with this [premise],” he wrote. “I know because I asked.”

It’s still possible, in other words, to create an artisanal punctum within the dull studium of streaming style, the “sheeny blandness” that Michael Szalay sees as the purview of Apple TV+ in particular. It’s true that creative risks may be increasingly hard to take, and “certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn’t be made now.” But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. That, ultimately, may be the biggest takeaway from The Studio and The Franchise, which—not unlike The Pitt, one of this year’s biggest TV success stories—are shows about individuals doing the best they can within deeply flawed systems.

Perhaps the strongest case for refusing fatalism arrives in The Studio’s finale. Faced with insuperable odds—including a CEO too zonked on shrooms to deliver a crucial CinemaCon presentation—the gang resorts to a series of ingenious hacks, courtesy of Hollywood. (To revive Cranston, for instance, they stuff cocaine up his nose, because “it worked in the movie Flight!”) At the climactic moment, they swing their boss in on a suspension wire, and Matt, ad-libbing, leads the crowd in an impromptu chant: “Movies … movies … movies!” It’s messy, it’s silly, and thanks to Cranston’s limp form—suspended from rafters, like an ancient Peter Pan—it’s a little grotesque. It’s so crazy, it just might work.