Notes on 'The Studio' From An Actual Hollywood Assistant

**Warning: this post contains spoilers for The Studio, and also the realities of working in Hollywood. Proceed at your own risk.**

In order to speak to my qualifications in writing this piece, I must first begin by making a disclosure: Melanie Fischer is not my real name.

The reason Melanie Fischer is not my real name is because in 2022 I started working at a Hollywood studio as an assistant — a world full of powerful people with very fragile egos, where having public opinions, especially about anything entertainment-related, is a massive, career-ruining liability. But the good folks at Pajiba kindly allowed me to keep piping in occasionally under this nom de guerre, so here we are.

(To provide an example, a friend of mine once got in massive trouble at work because he invited a friend to a preview screening of a movie, and then his friend left a negative review of the movie on Letterboxd that massively upset the director, who apparently had nothing better to do than throw a tantrum over a one star review left by a random 23-year-old.)

Which brings us to the actual question of the day here: how realistic is The Studio, actually?

As a satire, things are, of course, taken to extremes. Last week’s noir pastiche “The Missing Reel” was easily the most absurd and unrealistic episode so far. In reality what would happen is that Olivia Wilde would just blame the Camera PA, and the Camera PA would find himself unemployed and indefinitely unemployable before he could get a word in edgewise. The end.

But overall, The Studio is more accurate than you might think. This business is full of deeply insecure people who spent the better part of their 20s being traumatized by their bosses and now spend the rest of their career inflicting that trauma onto others—while still working under that same boss I mentioned previously, because none of these Boomers will retire, and every actor and A-list filmmaker who launches their own production company hires either their sibling or spouse to run it, regardless of skill or producing experience. This is so much the rule that when I see an exception I just assume the talent in question is an only child and unmarried unless shown evidence to the contrary.

Every day working at a studio is a series of crises, and 90% of them are about things that objectively do not matter. There was a phase where whenever I ordered my boss food from the executive dining room I had to request that her dishes be prepared with avocado oil and avocado oil only. Any assistant who’s been in the business for a few years has probably had at least one boss with ridiculously particular opinions about water. I know an assistant at a talent agency whose boss screamed at him in front of the entire department about how he’d “never make it in Hollywood” because he didn’t know the difference between deionized and distilled. (The Perrier joke in the latest episode is highly inaccurate, by the way; no water snob would be caught dead. If they really wanted to seal the deal it would have been Mountain Valley Spring. I hate that I know this.)

The Studio features way more pratfalls and slapstick, and kind of like how a lot of what doctors are shown doing in medical dramas would in real life be handled by nurses, a lot of the scrambling and running around featured in this show would in reality be handled by the assistants. There would also be like 8-10 mid-level executives in the hierarchy between freshly promoted creative executive Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders) and second-in-command Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), but that would be an unwieldy amount of additional characters to juggle, so the creative license taken there feels functionally necessary.

The least accurate thing about The Studio, overall, is actually what the studio looks like. Namely, that building is way too pretty, and the interior design far too pleasing and aesthetically coherent. I worked in the nice building where the studio president’s office was (although he and the company jet were typically elsewhere), and Continental Studios makes the building I worked in look like Lumon Industries by comparison. Considering Apple TV already has Severance, this is another artistic liberty that makes a lot of sense.

All things considered, The Studio is accurate enough that watching it feels simultaneously therapeutic and re-traumatizing. And as a studio survivor, no episode so far has been half so triggering as the latest, “The War.”

This is really not surprising, considering it’s arguably the episode most centered on studio lot politics so far, and features assistants the most prominently.

For me personally, there’s also the very specific trigger in how much of the episode centers around setting a meeting with Parker Finn. I’ve been the studio assistant who met Parker at the reception desk and offered him a beverage and made awkward small talk with him on the short walk upstairs to my boss’s office. (To be clear, the real life studio meeting with Parker otherwise bore no resemblance to The Studio; it was, if anything, unusually drama-free, it never had to be reset and everyone was on time.)

Normally, this wouldn’t be a particularly remarkable similarity, but my boss avoided coming into the office and especially doing in-person meetings at all costs. I can count on my hands with fingers to spare the number of general, in-person meetings she actually attended in the time I worked for her. Parker Finn was one of the lucky few.

(Meanwhile, I had to keep track of a list of the 50+ other poor souls she said she would meet with but had no real intention of doing so, but also I couldn’t just tell these fools who wouldn’t take a hint that, in the immortal words of Regina George, it’s not going to happen, because I didn’t have my boss’s permission to quash the meetings either. I regularly sent her an email with this list of meetings and a, hey, are any of these a priority, or are there maybe some I could put a pin in since you’re so busy? She was too busy to ever acknowledge these emails.)

The closest thing to The Studio’s Parker Finn drama I ever encountered in my time involved Pedro Pascal, although thankfully I was just a witness and not a participant. Pedro showed up at the reception desk when nobody was expecting him in a jumpscare an assistant directly involved referred to as, to quote our text convo from the time, “DEFCON 1.” Guests need a gate pass to get onto a studio lot, so generally speaking this exact scenario really shouldn’t have happened for a number of reasons, but he’s Pedro Pascal. That face card doesn’t decline. I doubt security even asked him for ID. So one assistant got to make small talk with Pedro for 10 minutes while the other scrambled to pull the two executives he came to meet with out of their other meetings. (The tl;dr version is that Pedro’s agent’s assistant had told our team he needed to reschedule, but apparently there was a miscommunication somewhere along the way, so Pedro showed up at the originally scheduled time. Honest mistake; no attempted sabotage involved. Probably.)

Anyway, moving on.

Perhaps the most profoundly accurate aspect of “The War” is the way in which the assistants are in the trenches of their boss’s political battles. We are the foot soldiers, cannon fodder, human shields, and scapegoats. As a Hollywood executive’s assistant, things including but not limited to traffic, the weather, flight delays, and the mistakes and misdeeds of others, can and quite likely will be held against you.

Something about “The War” that I cannot emphasize enough as someone who actually lives in this world is how much Quinn comes across in this episode as a complete psychopath. No, I am not a licensed medical professional, but also, there is no other way to interpret the evidence. Her frustrations are incredibly relatable and practically universal to assistants and junior executives everywhere. However, to go so quickly from being in the trenches to absolutely wrecking not just one but two assistants’ days without even the slightest hesitation or speck of remorse is not something a person hindered by the capacity for empathy is capable of.

But this in itself is also pretty on the money. Showbiz is a dog eat dog world, and in terms of surviving the grueling I-finally-see-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-no-wait-that’s-an-oncoming-train hellscape that is being a Hollywood assistant long enough to make it to the other side, truly not caring does provide some advantage in terms of being able to trudge through the endless slog without burning out.

Last but not least, to discuss the other star player of “The War”: Sal. The Studio is a well cast show on the whole, but I must give particular kudos to Ike Barinholtz. Seniority-wise, the studio executive I worked for was very much a Sal, and his line readings here are astoundingly on point. The tone he uses when he calls for his assistant after the first attempted Parker Finn meeting falls apart set me so on edge I had to pause my TV and take a quick walk around my couch to shake it off. And to end on a lighter note than my trauma, the inflection he uses and even the hand gestures he makes when he asks, “who the f*ck is Owen Kline?” is a truly uncanny match to the way my boss once delivered that very same question on a call with a producer—only, she was referring to Barry Keoghan. (Pre Sabrina Carpenter, post Banshees of Inisherin Oscar nom.)