Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Seth Rogen's Love-Hate Letter to Hollywood edition.

It's Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025, and this week we will be discussing,

first off, the new Apple TV Plus comedy, The Studio, starring and co-created by Seth Rogen,

about a mid-level executive at a Hollywood movie studio who finds himself suddenly put in charge of

the whole operation. We will also talk about the new indie film, Ephes, which tells the story of the final game of amateur league baseball at a field in small town Massachusetts that's about to be paved over and built on.

Finally, we'll ask on dear friend of the program, Rebecca Onion. In fact, she's so dear that she was last week's guest host to discuss the new book by Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping.

That's a second prequel to the wildly successful Hunger Games trilogy.

This is the first new book from Suzanne Collins in five years, and it has the series

many rabid fans very excited.

I am joined today by Culture Gabfest, Stallwart, Dan Coice, a writer at Slate.

Hey, Dan.

Hey, hey, hey, hey. And of course, as always, by the critic Stephen Metcalfe, who needs no introduction, Steve.

Hey, Dana. Though he's only 42 years old, Seth Rogan has been acting in, writing, directing, and producing movies in some TV for nearly 25 years now. For the majority of those projects, Rogan has worked with his longtime

creative partner, Evan Goldberg, a close friend since the two grew up together near Vancouver.

Together, they've either co-written or co-directed or both, such films as Superbad,

Pineapple Express, Neighbors 2, This is the End, the Interview, the Teenage Mutant Ninja

Turtles reboot that we talked about last year on this show.

We liked it quite a bit, as I recall.

Rogan and Goldberg's latest collaboration is the studio, a new comedy series on Apple TV Plus that began airing a couple of weeks ago.

In the studio, Rogan stars as Matt Remick, an executive at the fictional legacy studio of Continental.

This is a studio they say has been

around for over a century, so we're talking the equivalent of a Warner Brothers, MGM, Universal, etc.

...