The “TV is Art” team won. When I first started writing about television in the early 2010s, there was still something of a taboo about lavishing critical attention on this down-market medium. For many decades, TV was the “boob tube,” the “idiot box,” a medium that wasted your time and attention rather than rewarding them. But in the late 1990s, things started to change. There was a push in popular journalism to consider television not just as an influential medium, but as an art form. It didn’t take right away. Into the 2010s, well after the rise of the premium cable prestige series, after the rise of Tony Soprano and Walter White, my reviews and recaps would still inspire trolls to chastise me for taking television too seriously. But eventually, all the arguing and all the strategic disavowal (“It’s not TV, it’s HBO”) worked. These days, it’s not controversial to talk about TV series in artistic terms. The war over the cultural value of the medium is mostly over.

The irony is that the period when TV’s artistic status became broadly acceptable has also been a period of artistic stagnation, largely industry driven. Writers rooms, once the creative nerve centers of the medium, have been thinned out, de-emphasized, replaced by an increasingly rickety auteur model of TV creation and production; networks have come to prefer one-off, star-studded limited series to the challenge of multiseason drama; studios have come to prefer safe, cheap IP to original ideas; streamers commission veteran TV writers to squeeze the last drops out of already profitable film franchises; and even the big tentpole series of our time, the shows occupying the coveted HBO Sunday night time slot, are rehashes. Last year, FX’s Shōgun was one of the best series on the air, while Netflix’s 3 Body Problem was one of the worst. Both were green-lit because they were adaptations of valuable, battle-tested IP; both emerged from the same swamp.

I think it’s fair, then, to ask whether Apple TV ’s new streaming series The Studio—a tart love letter to the art and industry of old-school filmmaking—is a rebuke to its medium or an attempt to revive it. Created by star Seth Rogen with his lifelong collaborator Evan Goldberg, as well as Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and

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