Seth Rogen has been a busy man. In the middle of a non-stop publicity and Emmy campaign for his acclaimed new Apple TV+ series, “The Studio,” he filmed Dylan Meyer’s “The Wrong Girls” alongside Kristen Stewart. But as the series unfurled, ideas were being thrown up in his office for a potential second season. A green light that officially occurred on May 6th.
READ MORE: “The Studio”: An incredible love letter and takedown of the Hollywood studio machine
When we caught up with Rogen earlier this month, he was in his office, hard at work on the follow-up, admitting there was “no shortage of ideas” and that he and co-creator Evan Goldberg were getting flooded with stories from people. But what may initially seem like a no-brainer might not always work as a 30-minute “pressurized” story.
“I’d say if you asked me now, yeah, I’m looking at a board with 30 ideas on it, and I’d say there are two or three that I would put money on actually becoming for sure episodes next season,” Rogen says. “But I’m still not sure. Sometimes we’ll write the whole script and be like, “No, this didn’t quite get there.” That happened a lot in the first season. We wrote four scripts for entire episodes, and I was just like, ‘I don’t think this is good enough.’ Sometimes it’s easier to just pivot to a whole new idea, and so I expect that to happen a lot.”
During our conversation, Rogen reveals how “The Oner,” the most acclaimed episode of the season, came to be; what made Sarah Polley return to acting after 15 years;
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: First of all, congratulations on the series. I am such a massive fan. It’s so good.
Seth Rogen: Thank you so much. That’s so nice. Appreciate.
I have to tell you this, and in no way am I trying to make this about me in any way, but I’m not sure if you are aware, but there are only two established journalists who do what we do who have ever worked for a movie studio.
That’s crazy.
IndieWire’s Anne Thompson and I. We are the only two who’ve actually worked directly for a movie studio. So when I watched…
Where did you work?
When I was a youngin’, I worked at Paramount Pictures, and I presented to the head of the studio, Sherry Lansing, many times.
Oh wow, that’s amazing.
I didn’t experience PTSD like my other industry friends watching the show, but I yelled at the screen multiple times because not that much has changed in 20 years.
No, it’s a funny thing I found that people who don’t work in the entertainment industry are like the show, but think we are presenting an incredibly exaggerated version of things, and people who I know in the industry like the show, but think we are presenting an incredibly realistic version of things.
I wanted to ask about that. I saw it weeks before, and I was telling industry friends to get excited for it. And then within a day of it, those first episodes dropping, I must’ve had six DMs from people being like, “Oh my God, I’m having PTSD.” Is that what you wanted? Does that mean you did what you set out to do?
I mean, I don’t know if our specific goal was to trigger a trauma in people, [Laughs.] but it was meant to capture our own experiences with it as viscerally as possible. You know what I mean? And that was a word we used a lot. So yeah, I think the idea that people who have experienced similar things have a visceral reaction to it, I think it does mean that it is a good expression of our experience and what we were trying to put out there. But yeah, it’s based on a lot of traumatic things I’ve experienced, so…

Was there anything that made it into the show that you second-guessed including?
Oh, a lot of things. I think I’m specifically drawn to those ideas for better or worse, honestly. I’ve experienced moments where I’m like, “Well, this would be good, but we can’t actually do that. It’s too close to the bone.” And then we do it. Someone talks me into doing it, and it ends up being a line of dialogue or a story beat or something. I’ve seen that happen a lot of times where I’ve really said, “Well, what we should really do is this, but we can’t actually do that.” And then we end up doing it, and people love it, and it rarely has a negative impact on the people who actually were there experiencing the thing. And it mostly has a very positive impact on the people. So I think the more I’m drawn to finding a way to do it that works narratively and comedically, those ideas are the most exciting to me. The ones where, yeah, I feel there’s a danger to them, even just in how personally I feel about them.
Correct me if I’m wrong, I believe your assistant or someone on your team pitched the concept of the show?
It sort of came up conversationally. I can’t remember it definitively. I know me and Frida [Perez], who was my assistant at the time, were talking when the idea first came up. And we were both watching “The Larry Sanders Show.“ It was on the set of “The Fabelmans,” and she was reading this book called “The Studio,” about studio heads in the seventies. I was trying to think of an idea for something I could do, and then through that the idea of the show came up, which is why I hired her to be a writer on the show and she’s one of the creators and executive producers of the show because it very much initially came up through conversations me and her were having. Yeah.
When you look back at it now, what was the toughest nut to crack in terms of the narrative and laying out the series?
I mean, I think the decision to lean hard into comedy and how to really do that in a way that was kind of unabashed and hopefully sustainable was hard. And I think the idea to not make it serialized and to make it more episodic was really the thing we talked the most about. How do we hopefully give the show the depth and sort of resonance that people expect from streaming comedic television, but also deliver what we were big fans of, which was like, I’m like, “Seinfeld” is my favorite thing ever. And years ago, I did a live reading of “Seinfeld” episodes in a theater, and it was almost like I got the Rosetta Stone of comedy in a weird way. And as we were doing these readings, I was seeing like, “Oh, there’s such a beauty to setting up an idea, building it, building it, building it, building it, paying it off and wrapping it up in one contained thing. And hopefully there’s ways to deepen the characters and explore things.” Maybe you haven’t explored doing that, but that became really hard and not how a lot of us have worked recently. I work on other television shows, and they’re so about the overall story and the overall arc. And so that’s the hardest thing, honestly, is we have so many ideas where it’s like we’re making a sequel to Kool-Aid, we are launching a streaming service, whatever. And it’s like, “O.K., those are funny ideas.” And if our show was playing out over the course of a season like that, then it would be kind of easy to set up these storylines that you’re checking in with and they’re building slowly throughout the season. But that’s not how the show is. If it’s about a streaming service, the one 30 minute episode that is condensed and pressurized that explores every comedic idea about us launching a streaming service that we could ever want to include in an episode while also hopefully offering some sort of perspective we have on the state of that while also hopefully deepening the characters in some way and showing you sides of them you haven’t seen, but really setting it up and paying it off for the most part and trying to make it funny. I’ve worked on things where it’s like the storylines are dramatic, but the sort of colorfulness and quirkiness of the characters is what adds comedy to it. And I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it to be like, as you explain the plot of the episodes, it is inherently comedic. There’s a joke. It couldn’t not be a comedy. The idea that I go to the Golden Globes and I’m just trying to get thanked in a speech is a comedic idea at its core. There are dramatic underpinnings to it, but it is something that is designed to be comedic. So, that to us was also really hard, honestly. And something that we have very high standards for and does make the show, I think, in some ways harder to write, because we are thinking of 10. There’s a two-part [episode at] the end, but it has to be 10 incredibly pressurized self-contained ideas, each one exploring a very specific facet of the industry or the lives or existential crisis of these people. But again, really cramming all that into what is the episode, what is the situation that allows us to explore this? And in that sense, it’s like a genuine attempt to make situational comedy at a high level.