via Apple TV+ / Universal
Audio By Carbonatix
I might sound like the stoned, Darren Aronofsky-obsessed film major you got trapped next to at a junior-year house party, but let’s just lay it all out there: Episode 9 of Apple TV+’s The Studio is Seth Rogen dragging his sharp Hollywood satire to Vegas for something more profound than your usual Hollywood road trip on the I-15 through the Mojave Desert.
This isn’t Vinny Chase and the Entourage crew trading punches with Seth Green over a crude Jackson Pollock reference (The Studio already did its obligatory Entourage acknowledgment).
I think what Seth Rogen is getting at with this episode is much richer and darker, dialed up on mescaline and existential dread.
If you watch The Studio Episode 9, “CinemaCon,” closely, you’ll sniff out that it’s actually a full-blown love letter to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
If you’re not familiar, that’s the Johnny Depp and Benico Del Toro movie your gravity bong-building roommate, the one who kept making sploofs out of old toilet paper rolls and dryer sheets, wouldn’t stop quoting. He probably made you watch it after packing a bowl as big as a softball and microwaving some pizza rolls. The one with bats, lizards, golf shoes, ether binges, with all sorts of heady symbolism about the American Dream bleeding out onto the Strip.
That roommate was me. Trust me—I’m a doctor on the subject.
Am I saying this is a scene-for-scene remake of Thompson’s lost weekend covering the Mint 400? Not exactly—but it’s pretty damn close!
Both Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Studio follow a kind of warped hero’s journey, fueled by desperate ambition. Thompson is chasing the death rattle of the American Dream under the guise of a sports assignment. Rogen’s Matt Renick is on a mission to protect his studio’s soul, navigating a minefield of corporate sharks and psychedelic distractions. They’re both on noble quests, in their own way—truth-seekers disguised as degenerates, trying to make sense of a system so warped it demands conformity to succeed, and punishes anyone who resists by devouring them whole.
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert…”
The episode kicks off with Seth Rogen‘s studio executive character, Matt Renick, having a peaceful dinner with his mother, played by iconic Cheers legend Rhea Perlman.
Renick picks up the phone (just like when Raul Duke answers the call to go to Vegas by the pool in Fear and Loathing), then steps outside the restaurant, greeted by an overall-wearing blonde who looks like she just got done with a midafternoon Venice Beach soundbath. She hands him a bag of chocolate mushrooms and asks him if he understands the dosage.
Like a fool, he nods that he does.
He most certainly does not.
The scene takes place in a restaurant with Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge vibes, echoing the place in Los Angeles where Thompson and his attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta set off in the convertible Red Shark, barreling past Barstow and into bat country. And speaking of the Red Shark, in The Studio, there’s even a scene where Rogen heads to the airport in his convertible, cruising through a desert while listening to Matt Belloni’s popular The Town showbiz podcast instead of Brewer & Shipley’s 1970 soft rock hit, “One Toke Over The Line.”
“As your attorney, I advise you…”
People often forget Thompson’s Vegas bender was actually a work trip. So many off-the-rails Vegas misadventures are! It wasn’t a vacation, and I don’t think the concept of the modern bachelor party existed in the early ’70s. Like countless American professionals who trek to Vegas on their company’s dime for conventions each year, Thompson arrived with a legitimate assignment. And, as often happens on work trips to Vegas, it quickly unraveled into a brutish, hedonistic free-for-all.
Vegas thrives when things go off the rails.
Thompson was there to cover the Mint 400 off-road race for Sports Illustrated in the spring of 1971. Acosta, who’s frequently overshadowed in gonzo lore, and who later had a bitter falling-out with Thompson over the commercial success of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, was trying to dodge LAPD heat over his increasingly intense Chicano Movement activism in East Los Angeles.
Here’s another fun fact: Thompson’s original gig was just a simple 250-word photo caption for SI. After he and his attorney got into their drug stash, he turned in a sprawling 2,500-word psychedelic ramble instead. SI aggressively rejected it. Luckily, Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner saw something special in Thompson’s pages. He encouraged him to push forward and keep writing it, which Thompson did quietly back at Owl Farm in Colorado to perfect the rhythm of the writing and sharpness of the humor, turning a failed assignment into gonzo journalism history.
Similarly, Rogen’s chaos in The Studio hinges on a work assignment: CinemaCon, Hollywood’s annual schmoozefest where studios pitch theater owners their upcoming blockbusters. With tentpoles like The Kool-Aid Movie in the works and a number of other high-profile projects, Continental Studios has a blockbuster slate. But then Matt finds out from corporate overlord Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) that Amazon is circling Continental Studios like a hungry shark, primed to gobble it up and pink-slip the workers in the dream factory.
Nothing embodies a “savage journey to the heart of the American Dream” quite like the cold, ruthless capitalism of mergers and acquisitions, and the human wreckage left scattered in their wake.
It’s quite poetic when you really think about it.
“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
On the private jet to Vegas, Matt explicitly references Fear and Loathing: “We’re going to party tonight like it’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
His junior exec, Quinn, hasn’t seen it (though she quickly points out she’s seen Swingers—”Vegas, baby!”). It’s a perfect snapshot of the generational divide in cinematic literacy.
There’s probably also a subtext here about how us jam band loving stoners have a *really* annoying and pretentious habit of projecting our obscure tastes in movies and art as the only good taste, like we are the ultimate arbiters of cool. Reality check: the masses think quite differently, especially with their wallets in the art they support.
via Apple TV+
For Matt, Fear and Loathing is canon. It’s the quintessential dorm-room movie for a wisecracking stoner who proudly hung a Che Guevara poster or spent too many late nights passionately debating Trainspotting. You probably know people like that. Hopefully they didn’t all suck.
This is an important moment in the episode. It’s the tell, subtly delivered by Rogen and his longtime writing partner Evan Goldberg. Blink and you’d miss it. By Hollywood standards, the billion-dollar Hangover franchise about a boozy Vegas bender gone wrong would have been a more palatable and populist reference, but I assume Rogen and Goldberg thought that would have been too easy.
But once you catch that little Fear And Loathing mention, it owns a little piece of real estate in your brain. Everything that follows can be viewed through the wild, psychedelic lens of Thompson’s legendary Vegas bender.
“This is what every party in this industry was like before your generation ruined Hollywood,” Matt jokes, referencing the industry’s newfound post-#MeToo sobriety.
Then the mushrooms kick in, and Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz) gleefully announces he’s brought along some “pharmaceutical-grade cocaine.”
“You can’t stop here, this is bat country!”
Matt keeps referencing an “old-school Hollywood buffet” (translation: drugs elegantly laid out on a silver platter). Predictably, this quickly transforms the Vegas work mixer into full-blown chaos ahead of the studio’s big CinemaCon presentation. Dave Franco chatters nonstop nonsense, Zoe Kravitz mistakenly devours way too many mushroom chocolates, Quinn casually admits she’s mixed ketamine into her mushroom cocktail, and Kathryn Hahn’s tightly wound marketing exec Maya Mason spectacularly unravels.
Meanwhile, Bryan Cranston’s Griffin Mill vanishes completely after drowning shots of Hennessy and fistfuls of confectionary psilocybin., dissolving into a Vegas casino void, leaving a trail of nacho cheese. The paranoia has set in.
Suddenly, everyone’s frantically scrambling to find Mill before he’s due on stage in the morning—a direct echo of Thompson desperately corralling all over Vegas looking for Dr. Gonzo during their paranoid ether-and-LSD-fueled escapades. Like Thompson’s absurdly formal DEA conference, CinemaCon is the stuffy professional facade barely concealing Vegas’s true nature: a clangy playground that drags out everyone’s inner beast.
“Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
Just as Thompson used a gonzo journalist’s ether-induced delirium at Circus Circus to document the death of the American Dream, Rogen uses Matt’s mushroom spiral to show the slow, agonizing collapse of creative freedom under corporate mandates and algorithm-driven “brand-safe storytelling.”
The episode hasn’t yet hit its definitive “wave” moment, but I sense it’s coming in part 2.
“The Wave” moment is Thompson’s iconic reflection on the rise and fall of ’60s counterculture idealism, the moment Terry Gilliam so vividly captured in his 1998 adaptation. Johnny Depp’s haunting monologue “on a nervous night in Las Vegas” is played out over flickering images of the Vietnam War in a hotel room and a neon-lit Vegas during the Wayne Newton years. It’s a striking eulogy to the hopeful rebellion of the ’60s as it gave way to the cynical hedonism of the ’70s. It’s easy to see The Studio approaching a similar breaking point for Hollywood’s creative idealism, especially ironic considering it’s funded by Apple, one of the richest corporations ever.
There’s even a journalist in this episode, as any Hunter Thompson ode would require. In a delightful meta twist, entertainment journalist Matt Belloni makes a cameo as himself, and is likely about to get a major scoop about Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston’s) unraveling or Amazon wanting to buy Continental and turn it into a IP chop shop.
Quinn tries managing Belloni as he sniffs around for a scoop, only for Patty (Catherine O’Hara) to anonymously leak the unfolding fiasco after Mill’s brutishness comes to a boil, heightening the show’s satirical realism.
“What’s the score here? What’s next?”
The frantic search to preserve the studio’s public integrity by tracking down Griffin Mill mirrors Thompson’s panicked attempts to keep Dr. Gonzo alive—or at least out of jail. Just as Thompson grappled with mounting hysteria amid Vegas depravity, Matt and his team scramble through the sprawling Venetian property to contain Mill before he tanks all their careers.
Of course, nobody’s really in control here.
That’s exactly why this homage lands so perfectly. Hunter Thompson never romanticized drugs when he wrote about them in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; he just presented his truth about them. All that nobility and heroism was a lovely thought, but he still had to sell his writing to pay his bills too at the end of the day.
Rogen isn’t glamorizing drugs either, nor is he doing a Thompson impression. He’s holding a funhouse mirror up to Vegas’s twisted sense of capitalist excess, a place where you need to “learn to love losing,” as Thompson writes in Fear and Loathing, if you’re ever going to make it home after your pilgrimage. That’s the American way.
In Fear and Loathing, Thompson famously captured that heartbreaking instant when the vibrant, idealistic energy of the ’60s—the intoxicating sense that “we were winning,” that the world could truly change for good—finally crested, broke, and rolled back, leaving only disillusionment and neon-lit debris in its wake.
Squint at Hollywood today, and you’ll see echoes of that same cycle unfolding: a perpetual churn of creativity, commercial viability, optimism, and bleak reality, spinning endlessly in an industry driven by soul-sucking passion.
Today, the only players with pockets deep enough to make projects that actually get seen are mega-behemoths like Apple, Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, and the rest of the streaming titans battling it out with the hope you’ll tap their app on your TV in the evenings after unwinding from your soul-sucking job or needing a diversion from the soul-sucking content served to you via algorithm on your phone.
Today’s content industry is just Thompson’s paranoid bat country updated, just with everyone yapping into their phones with a tiny lapel mic for TikTok clout instead of cigarette holders.
“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
That’s the beauty of The Studio, which has now been greenlit by Apple for a second season.
Beneath Hollywood jokes and oh-my-God-will-I-ever-stop-tripping-my-balls-off? dread lies genuine creative anxiety: What does originality mean when algorithms dictate creativity? How do you chase art when safe bets and templates govern every green light?
If you’re a creative person trying to commodify your art so you can actually make a living, it’s the kind of question that gnaws at you. In an era when literally anyone with an iPhone can make something sorta cool, but maybe not forever cool, it’s a question nobody has a satisfying answer for. Nothing is built to last.
Personally, my other favorite thing about The Studio is how Seth Rogen constantly winks and nods at iconic cinematic moments, quietly testing our film literacy. Watching the show reminds me of sitting in college film classes where we’d first watch Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo in Psycho, then immediately recognize that same moment echoed by Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction. Our professor would pause the scene to talk about how great filmmakers reference each other. That’s basically what the second episode, “One Shot”, was, a wink and nod and homage to Martin Scorsese’s famous tracking shot through the nightclub from Goodfellas, and all the other ways the one-shot has been used over the years.
Catching these subtle nods feels rewarding, like Rogen is nudging us to pay attention. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” as the saying goes. It’s fun to have a small screen cinematic universe like The Studio to play Where’s Waldo? with.
That’s what sets The Studio apart for me. Hollywood is having a conversation with Hollywood itself.
Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with urgency because he documented the end of something profound. As he put it, “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”
Getting caught is The Studio’s whole jam. It just documents a slow, spiraling collapse, not a bang or a whimper, but a drawn-out melt into Vegas casino carpeting.
Thompson meticulously crafted and recrafted Fear and Loathing, intertwining life and art until it became his definitive opus. Seth Rogen’s Vegas odyssey likewise blends life and art, parody and reality, resulting in an episode serving as both tribute and damningly hilarious reflection.
And if that doesn’t earn an approving nod and “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?” from Hunter’s ghost, nothing ever will.