The Studio, Seth Rogen’s new auteur project on Apple TV+, deserves credit for openly bragging about how expensive it is. In its second episode, the real-life actress and director Sarah Polley schemes her way into getting Rogen’s Matt Rennick, head of the fictional Continental Studios, to spend $800,000 for the rights to a Rolling Stones song for the clinching scene of her latest small-budget lesbian coming-of-age comedy. Rennick slapsticks his way into ruining the most important day of her shoot, and the episode closes with the rising swells of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Because the show is dense with witty meta-comments on Hollywood waste, we can be sure that the figure we heard a few minutes earlier was an authentic one. Maybe The Studio’s existence is another such comment: Hollywood has proven so wasteful that we are now forced to watch its dysfunctions unfold on a money-glutted streaming service run by a tech company that survives off of Chinese slave labor.

The Studio, a comedy about Rennick’s misadventures as the chief of a 21st-century industrial-scale movie operation, is awash in famous faces, playing themselves. Steve Buscemi, Charlize Theron, Ron Howard and the rest of them look like they’re having a fantastic time skewering the surreal industry that’s made them rich and important. Hollywood, or whatever’s left of it, is still gazing at itself. The twist this time is that you can watch it gaze wherever and whenever you’ve got the internet, which is one of the things that’s nearly killed Hollywood.