‘The Studio' Parodies Diversity Casting In Hilarious New Ice Cube Episode

Forbes

02-05-2025

The Studio
The Studio is easily one of the best shows on TV at the moment, and the latest episode is no exception. While my favorite episode of the season remains 'The Oner' which was just so clever on so many levels, this week's episode, 'Casting', takes aim at contemporary social issues, and it's genuinely hilarious.
The series follows bumbling new studio chief of Continental Studios, Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) as he embarks on a series of misadventures in his first months on the job. Whether he's disrupting a sensitive movie shoot, getting into a pissing contest at a charity fundraiser, breaking Martin Scorsese's heart, or throwing down with the surprisingly mean-spirited movie director, Ron Howard, Remick can always be counted on to put his foot in his mouth in spectacular fashion.
The show blends slapstick comedy with a series of really poor choices into one of the best parodies of modern Hollywood out there. Fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm should take note. Spoilers for Season 1, Episode 7 follow.
In 'Casting' we return to the Kool-Aid Movie that we first learned about in the season premiere. Remick and his colleagues are excited about the positive feedback its poster has received. But their enthusiasm is short-lived when marketing director Maya Mason (Kathryn Hahn) has a moment of doubt. She wonders if casting Ice Cube as the voice of Kool-Aid Man is playing into racial stereotypes. (The meta-joke of Ice Cube playing an anthropomorphic beverage is never mentioned by the characters).
Remick and executive producer Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz) aren't convinced at first, but soon all three are in full panic mode. They take their concerns to junior executive Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders) because she's not white, and she tries to assure them that it's not a big deal. She's never viewed Kool-Aid as a black person's drink, she tells her colleagues, but rather a 'poor person's drink' which obviously only makes matters worse. Next, they turn to social media manager, Tyler (Dewayne Perkins) who reassures them further, saying it would actually be racist to not cast a black person as Kool-Aid Man, but then adds he doesn't want to be the voice of 'all black people.'
From here, things keep going from bad to worse. Guest stars Ziwe and Lil Rel Howery tell them that Kool-Aid Man should, indeed, be black, but then voice concerns that his wife isn't also black.
After recasting Mrs. Kool-Aid, they realize that solving one problem has created a new one: Now the entire animated Kool-Aid family is black, while the live-action Parch family is all white. The 'segregation' of the cast leads them into another panic, so they decide to make all the characters black.
The original cast for the Kool-Aid Movie included Ice Cube, Sandra Oh, Josh Duhamel and Jessica Biel. A perfectly diverse cast that, in a sane world, could never be seen as problematic. But the paranoia and delusion of the producers leads them to remove all the actors who aren't black, and prompts Remick to utter the truly preposterous phrase that this could be 'our Hamilton.'
But when they take this to director Nick Stoller, he says this will require major rewrites, and his writing team decides that they need to quit since none of them are black and don't feel comfortable writing from that point of view. Stoller says he can rewrite the film on his own, but at this late stage, he'll need to use some AI animation services to stay within the budget and timeline. You can pretty much see where this is going.
The spiraling continues as Remick and Sal and Maya go through a laborious and absurd attempt to breakdown the racial population of America so that it can be exactly represented in the movie. Meanwhile, Quinn informs them that making the entire cast black actually brings them back to square one, playing into the very racial stereotypes they were concerned with in the first place. Finally, Remick talks to Ice Cube directly, albeit awkwardly, and is reassured once and for all that everything will be okay.
All of this takes place just before the Anaheim Comic-Con where Remick is set to reveal Ice Cube as Kool-Aid Man. But once the pair of them are on stage, the first question they receive isn't about race or casting at all: It's about about a leak that the movie is using AI to replace actual animators. Led by a furious Ice Cube, the crowd devolves into shouting and uproar.
'Thank god they didn't mention race,' Maya says from the sidelines. 'We dodged a bullet,' Sal agrees happily. Matt stands on the stage alone, head hung in defeat.
This was a terrific episode, clocking in at just 24 minutes, and I'm thrilled to see a show even tackle this issue in the first place. We've entered a phase of the culture wars where the constant state of backlash and rancor makes actually discussing issues like tokenism and problematic casting next to impossible, at least with any kind of nuance. It's refreshing to see a show like The Studio poke fun at just how ridiculous the whole thing is behind the scenes, where out-of-touch executives, even with the best intentions, often make matters worse.
Apple, meanwhile, continues to have some of the best streaming options out there, with shows like Severance, The Studio and Your Friends & Neighbors at the top of my 2025 TV list, just to name a few.