What Else I'm Watching: 'The Studio,' 'Severance,' 'Mickey 17,' 'The Last Of Sheila,' 'Top Chef,' & 'The Amazing Race'

When I'm not watching documentaries...

I watch many movies and shows that aren’t documentaries, so it’s time I started sharing my thoughts on some of them in this non-Nonfics channel.

The Studio Season 1 (2025)

After reading all the first reviews of The Studio for my Rotten Tomatoes gig, I dove into the new Apple TV+ series. The first two episodes don’t debut on the streaming service until March 26, so I’ll avoid spoilers and give a brief overview for now. Seth Rogen (who co-created the show with Evan Goldberg, Frida Perez, and Alex Gregory) stars as a newly promoted studio head, and each episode follows a stand-alone vignette centered on Hollywood filmmaking and culture. Some narrative threads carry through the 10 episodes of the first season, but The Studio is primarily episodic.

A commonly noted comparison that fits is the structure of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Many of the episodes of The Studio end with Matt having screwed something up royally, the result of a chain reaction of his multiple errors dealing with a particular situation. A consistent bit of the score even plays as each installment concludes, and it might as well be the iconic Curb Your Enthusiasm theme. What’s different about Matt, compared to Larry David, is that Matt’s foibles are caused by his need to be liked, whereas Larry is the opposite, not caring what anyone thinks of him. Most of the non-regular characters wind up hating Matt anyway.

While The Studio seems to be the perfect show for cinephiles, with its inside baseball plotlines and constant references and homages to classic and cult movies, it can also make us cringe. Matt serves a fantasy role for us. He’s a studio head who loves and knows cinema more than he cares about the business and money side of Hollywood. He’s also a fanboy. He wants to be on set and be friends with actors and directors, and he likes to prove to them that he’s familiar with their work and film as an art in general. As much as we movie geeks wish we could run a studio and greenlight great films, a la Robert Evans at Paramount in the 1970s, The Studio shows us how much of a nightmare that dream is. Matt has to keep selling out and oversee tentpoles like a Kool-Aid Man movie, a toilet-humored zombie horror comedy, and a blatant ripoff of Smile. He also winds up making Martin Scorsese cry due to his cowardice.

Meanwhile, The Studio is terrific filmmaking (or television-making) itself. Each episode is tightly scripted, and most shots are ambitiously extensive oners that last for most of the runtime. Some episodes are better than others. I really like the first two and then the two-part finale for their intensity. When it tries too hard to fully mimic a classic, as with the Chinatown-inspired fourth episode, the show feels tedious. But then, later, it pays tribute to something like Weekend at Bernies within a larger farce, and it works brilliantly. If you like Robert Altman’s The Player but think it’s too slow (or even if you like its pace), you’ll enjoy The Studio.

Severance Season 2 (2025)

I’m all caught up on the second season of Severance heading into the finale next Friday, and I have to say I don’t know what is going on. I do like the romantic drama involving the innies and outties, though they all wind up being pretty sad in the penultimate episode. And I am enjoying it, especially when it gets particularly surreal, as in an episode revealing what and where Gemma is up to. But the last episode of this season needs to provide some answers. Like: what is Cold Harbor? The Season 1 finale was intense and dropped a major bombshell with Helly’s identity, so I can’t wait to see what happens at the end of this season.

Mickey 17 (2025)

After doing a roundup of the first reactions to Mickey 17 for Rotten Tomatoes, I was pretty excited for the movie. After doing a roundup of the first reviews of Mickey 17, my anticipation tempered, partly because I remembered that I wasn’t the biggest fan of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer. Fortunately, I enjoyed this one better than that and even Okja. Robert Pattinson’s dual performance is the primary reason (of this year’s dual roles trend, of those I’ve seen, he tops The Monkey’s Theo James, who was pretty fantastic). Otherwise, it didn’t have as much depth for its sci-fi narrative and themes as I’d have liked. It reminded me of later Gilliam or Jeunet films after those directors lost some of their imaginative spark. I think it would have been more entertaining with Jeunet at the helm, but only Bong does weird creatures the way he does.

The Last Of Sheila (1973)

After seeing Glass Onion, The Last of Sheila feels quite familiar. I knew it was an inspiration for the Knives Out sequel, but not as much as it is. That’s not a bad thing, and plot-wise, the movies are separate enough by the end of the first act. The Last of Sheila is a mystery about a get-together with seven Hollywood characters, including a producer who invites the other six on his yacht for a week of games on the anniversary of his wife’s death. The cast, consisting of James Coburn (as the producer), Dyan Cannon, Richard Benjamin, Joan Hackett, James Mason, Rachel Welch, and a young Ian McShane, is fantastic. Mason’s character being a child molestor is a little weird since he was Humbert Humbert in Lolita. He and Benjamin are terrific together at the end. The twist isn’t too surprising, but the way it plays out and is revealed works. As with Glass Onion, I think I’ll like it more on a second viewing.

Top Chef Season 22 (2025)

Funny that Top Chef is still avoiding Atlanta, even after I complained (jokingly) to the producers last year. Funnier that Top Chef is in Canada this year — not because there’s already a separate Top Chef Canada within the franchise but because of current events. Anyway, I don’t have anything to say about the season after one episode, but I recommend reading Vince Mancini’s first installment of Top Chef Power Rankings of the year. I LOL’d at the Woolly Willy reference.

The Amazing Race Season 37 (2025)

I also met Phil Keoghan in the past year (and then shared a flight with him on another occasion), so it seemed like a good time to get back into watching The Amazing Race with my family. Well, not my daughter, who has no time for anything as a family lately, but that’s because she’s 10 going on 15. Anyway, Phil is a great actor. I won’t explain what that means. After two episodes, we really like the gamers and the gay couple but not so much the dude who hated being in second place the first week so much that he acted like an underdog in Episode 2. Oh, I also can’t stop thinking that one of the contestants is actually Christopher McQuarrie.