Hollywood’s Funniest Show Is Also Hollywood’s Meanest Mirror

This week’s entertainment landscape has delivered the usual buffet of prestige drama, expensive spectacle, and celebrities explaining their “era” as if they’ve just discovered weather. My strongest recommendation is The Studio, Apple TV+’s savage comedy about movie executives, because it does something rare: it makes Hollywood look exactly as ridiculous as Hollywood actually is.

Benny’s Picks

The Studio — Apple TV+
The episode “The Oner” is a miniature disaster movie in which a single uninterrupted camera shot becomes everyone’s personal nervous breakdown. Seth Rogen is excellent as a studio boss who wants to be liked so badly he’d probably apologize to a parking meter, and the cameos are used properly: not as applause breaks, but as additional weapons.

Severance — Apple TV+
If you abandoned this after season one because you needed answers, congratulations on making television into a hostage negotiation. Go back. The episode “The We We Are” remains one of the great season finales of recent TV, and the show’s chilly office nightmare is still more imaginative than most films with three-hour runtimes and a dragon budget.

MAYHEM by Lady Gaga — streaming everywhere
Lady Gaga has made a pop album for people who miss when pop stars were allowed to be slightly unhinged. “Abracadabra” is the obvious sugar rush, but “Disease” is the real keeper: glossy, dramatic, and just dangerous enough to make your morning commute feel like the opening credits of a very expensive thriller.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore — bookstores, libraries, and e-readers
This is a missing-person mystery with enough family rot to fertilize a small orchard. Moore keeps shifting the timeline and point of view without turning the book into a literary escape room, and the central question is wonderfully nasty: how much can a wealthy family bury before the ground starts filing complaints?

Skip It

Another “cinematic universe” built around a person who punches things. I am begging studios to stop introducing a new tortured antihero by showing us his childhood, his scars, and one blurry shot of him staring at rain. If the pitch requires a flowchart, a timeline, and homework from three previous franchises, it is not entertainment. It is unpaid administrative labor.

Sleeper Pick

How To with John Wilson — Max
This strange little documentary comedy is what happens when a man with a camera wanders into ordinary life and discovers that everyone is already performing. Start with “How To Cover Your Furniture,” which begins as a practical guide and ends somewhere near the emotional edge of the universe. It is tender, bizarre, and more observant than a hundred shows shouting “relatable” at you.