Reaction: The Studio, "The Pediatric Oncologist" | Season 1, Episode 6

Matt leaves the bubble of Hollywood for the first—and last?—time

Photo: Apple TV+

If last week’s The Studio installment was about expanding the focus on the supporting characters, “The Pediatric Oncologist” is our first glimpse at the world beyond Continental Studios for Matt Remick. We know how he’s been forced to contort himself to survive his day-to-day running the studio, but for the first time we get a glimpse of how his job resonates in the “real world,” specifically his budding relationship with the eponymous doctor (played by Rebecca Hall).

On the one hand, the episode is set up like a classic workplace comedy problem, as Matt is pulled away from the important task of editing the Duhpocalypse trailer’s zombie diarrhea explosion to satisfy censorious “Heartland theater owners” concerned about concession sales to honor his commitment to the charity gala. But while past episodes have largely had Matt self-sabotage in industry situations, here the problem isn’t that he’s struggling to balance work and life. The issue is that he’s trapped with a group of doctors with no respect for what he does, no interest in movies, and no desire to even consider the idea that his work is remotely important.

To be clear, Matt still self-sabotages here on multiple levels. It’s one thing when the show is drawing the contrast itself, as when the two characters are both on “important work phone calls” and we cut between her conversation with a parent whose child with cancer is considering a clinical trial and Matt’s conversation about whether they can get away with the shitsplosion if they don’t show Josh Hutcherson covered in zombie diarrhea. But when the doctors start commiserating about the difficulties of their job, Matt can’t help but try to claim he faces similar hardships, a knee jerk response to a group of doctors who’ve been more than happy to share their derivative opinions about the movie business. As they become a broken record of every normie take on movies—they stream everything, too many superhero movies, we just watch TV, etc.—Matt just digs deeper into his need to defend his profession, culminating in him objectively giving $200,000 to charity to be an asshole.

What’s different in this case is that they deserve it in a way I’m not sure that we’ve seen so far in the season. Even if Matt’s argument that movies are as important as doctors is wrong, the way doctors dismiss movies generally is so toxic that they at least deserve to have an asshole yelling at them about it, y’know? And it’s not like the episode doesn’t give Matt his comeuppance in the form of his broken finger and subsequent collapse. The fact he’s still groggily sniping about the screen on the room of his hospital room is a reminder that Matt’s inherently petty, but we kind of want him to get a kiss-off moment after the way they treated him. He left the containment of the show’s premise, and learned that if he’s going to be bringing morning coffee to a hookup with a franchise movie playing on the TV, it needs to be an agent whose client was in the movie and who at least respects when a franchise isn’t based on existing I.P.

I’m curious how often the show explores episodes like this as it moves forward, when you consider that the thesis statement of this episode is that Matt is not a functional human being once removed from the boundaries of industry spaces. Mind you, he’s not fully functional within them either, but we see the clear limitations of his neuroses here. The Doctor finds him entirely funny and charming in isolation, but only up until the point where he tries to enter her world, and it becomes clear that the novelty of someone who is capable of humor is just that: a novelty. And the thing about The Studio is that it can’t abide people who don’t take this as seriously as Matt does. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to argue that The Emoji Movie is art, but I can see why being in that situation would force Matt to do so, and how that also makes it impossible for him to truly ever integrate into a world different than his own. And while this is an extreme take on that, anyone in a relationship with someone in a wildly different field than them has had to confront their own version of this, making this one of the more relatable episodes that simultaneously reinforces how unrelatable this world truly is.

Curious as always how people are landing with Matt, and how we feel about the concept of Spike Jonze came out of feature film retirement to make a horror comedy commentary on medical disinformation with Johnny Knoxville.