via Apple TV+
If you’ve been watching Seth Rogen’s new Apple TV+ series The Studio, you might’ve caught a sly little IYKYK moment in Season 1, Episode 6, “The Pediatric Oncologist.” At a cocktail party, a group of doctors start grilling Rogen’s character, Matt Remick, a newly minted Hollywood studio head, about his professional life. To a group of Cedars-Sinai pediatric oncologists, the world of filmmaking is an alien world. One of them asks if HBO’s Entourage ever felt a little too close to home. Remick barely flinches before dropping the most polite dagger imaginable:
“Entourage was a show beloved by millions of people.”
Dry and devastatingly subtle, the line lands like a quiet uppercut, but only if you know the long-running feud between Rogen and Entourage creator Doug Ellin.
Seth Rogen vs. Entourage: The Backstory
Let’s go back to 2008 and frame some cultural context around Entourage.
It hasn’t held up as well as other masterpieces of the era, like The Sopranos and The Wire, but let’s not forget that Entourage, in 2009, was a full-blown cultural phenomenon. It won Emmys. It had James Cameron. President Barack Obama was reportedly watching episodes in the White House and talking them over with staffers. The show became shorthand for a certain kind of aspirational guy fantasy: VIP access, fast cars, high-stakes agents, dream gigs handed out over bottle service. For a certain kind of dude, it was wish fulfillment on premium cable. Because it was a sexy show about a group of guys from Queens trying to “make it” in Hollywood, real-life Hollywood was all-in on it. They could see themselves in the mirrors. Entourage was unfathomably huge in 2009.
But so was Seth Rogen.
Which, ironically, made the moment even richer. Rogen wasn’t just some hater lobbing shots from the sidelines back in 2009. He was very much in the mix.
Coming off the one-two punch of Superbad and Pineapple Express with James Franco, Rogan was evolving from his schtick as a lovable stoner sidekick. He had long paid his dues. He was now emerging as a full-blown Hollywood power player. Rogen was only 27 years old in 2009, yet a creative tour de force who was writing, producing, headlining, and minting money at the box office. In 2009 alone, he voiced a gelatinous blue blob in Monsters vs. Aliens (which made nearly $400 million), went dark in Observe and Report, and reunited with Judd Apatow for Funny People.
By 2010, he was gearing up to headline The Green Hornet, already had Superbad, Pineapple Express, and Drillbit Taylor under his belt as a co-writer or producer, and was basically shaping the future of comedy from behind and in front of the camera.
If Entourage was a fantasy for aspiring actors, Rogen was living proof that the real cheat code was writing your own way in.
But in the cutthroat world of Tinseltown, what’s real and what’s performance? Where does the bit end and the ego begin?
Rogen’s comedy never quite clicked with Entourage’s chest-puffing dude-bro energy. Think Knocked-Up or Superbad. Where Entourage thrived on VIP tables, luxury cars, and Ari Gold screaming at someone before lunch, Rogen was building a universe around emotional vulnerability: stoned heart-to-hearts in Pineapple Express, a pregnancy freakout in Knocked Up, Jonah Hill crying in a parking lot over a bottle of Goldschläger in Superbad.
Entourage was about the pursuit of greatness and chasing your dream, much in the same way a team would win a championship and hang a banner in the rafters. Rogen’s movies were about dudes trying—and often failing!—to grow up, usually because of their own self-sabotaging ways (which, to be fair, is a core theme in the Entourage world too).
I don’t think it’s fair to say that one lane is more artistically superior than the other. They both were reflections of the times and have themes that are going to endured Both also have their cringey, regressive moments that punched down and didn’t age well. In the White Lotus sub-Reddit, a great conversation about this very subject in the Judd Aparow universe, unfolding right now.
It’s no surprise that lots of millennial-age dudes can relate to all this. In a lot of ways, as BroBible’s publisher, I’d like to think that’s a core dynamic of this very website’s whole ethos.
But back to the beef… and the origin story
In the public’s eyes, the beef between Rogen and Entourage began in June 2008, when Seth Rogen sat down with GQ’s Alex Pappademas and dropped a casual but stinging line that didn’t go unnoticed: “Our HBO pilot isn’t funny, but Entourage is?”
It was a throwaway dig, buried in a long, candid profile that charted Rogen’s rise from Canadian teen comic to the new face of studio comedy. This was peak Rogen—quietly rewriting the rules alongside the Apatow crew and minting money at the box office. He was reshaping what a leading man could look like.
The comment to GQ was Rogen being his candid, deadpan self, offhandedly wondering how a show like Entourage, with its Escalades, bottle service, and Ari Gold’s abusive workplace tantrums, had somehow become a cultural benchmark. Remember, this was during the era when Ari Gold was lauded as a cuthroat business shark and not just an HR red flag in a suit.
But in Hollywood, even an offhanded comment can start a war.
The next shot came a year later, in summer 2009. Entourage, never one to shy away from Hollywood douchebaggery, took a cheap shot at Rogen. Doug Ellin, clearly still stung by Rogen’s GQ dis, fired back with a petty jab disguised as dialogue. In Season 6, Episode 9 (“Security Briefs”), Turtle, whom Ellin had originally considered Rogen for before Jerry Ferrara, declares that there’s no way someone who looks like Seth Rogen could ever land Katherine Heigl, referencing Knocked Up two full years after it came out.
The scene lands like a drive-by roast. It’s sudden and mean-spirited, clearly written to bully one person in mind. It’s a very complicated exchange too. There’s no doubt it took some work to pull it off.
Rogen wasn’t exactly losing sleep over it. Right after the episode aired, he fired back on E!’s Daily 10, calling Ellin a “moron” and shrugging off the whole thing with a line that cut deeper than any scripted insult: he’d never seen Entourage, and had no plans to start. He also reminded viewers that Entourage executive producer Mark Wahlberg once called him “misogynistic”, which, considering the show’s legacy of bottle service and bikini models as background, was like getting called lazy by someone asleep at the wheel.
Beef: activated.
Here’s how Rogen told it back then, via Vulture:
“Yeah, those guys are assholes. I actually ran into Matt … Kevin Dillon in a Starbucks. And he’s like ‘You know, I’ve got to kind of apologize because apparently the guy who created our show doesn’t like you so much.’ And I said ‘Well, I have reason to believe because I think [showrunner] Doug Ellin is a moron from all I can understand so it makes sense he doesn’t like me.’ And I’ve kind of said some disparaging things about the show. Although in our defense, [producer] Mark Wahlberg called us misogynistic in an interview, so I think they kind of started that … It’s on. Luckily I never have and never plan on watching Entourage.”
The Studio vs. Entourage: Is it even a fair comparison?
I’ll be real: I was obsessed with Entourage back in the day. Hook, line, and sinker. Watching Vince and the boys cruise through Hollywood made me think, damn, maybe there’s a way to live a creative life: write, direct, tell stories, try to make something that culturally endures. Obviously, I didn’t do that. I took a different route. I ended up in the blog lane instead at this whole BroBible thing, writing about this stuff instead of doing it.
But I live in Culver City, just a few blocks from the Sony lot. And I still feel the hum of the ole dream factory. It’s real. I still hear that voice when I walk past the soundstages to grab a coffee at Super Domestic or Go Get ’Em Tiger: “Let’s make something” even though I probably never will, despite my close proximity to the mirage factory.
That’s probably why The Studio makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in the best way. It reminds me of the first time I rode the E.T. ride at Universal, or the old Backlot Tour, where the shark from Jaws lunges at the tram and you swear it’s real. It makes you feel how special movies can be, even when you know exactly how the trick is done.
I’ve seen some chatter that it’s a studio executive’s POV of the Entourage universe, in a way. Basically, what Entourage would be like if told by Dana Gordon at Warner Brothers. I like that in a way—it’s not a vs. or an either/or, but a moviemaking metauniverse.
What is similar between both The Studio and Entourage is the love of the game.
In a time when movies are flailing, streamers are dumping out algorithmic slop, and “Hollywood” feels more like a spreadsheet than a dream factory, that’s what makes The Studio feel rare. Hollywood loves to both parody and puff-up itself, but rarely with this much clarity or care.
Rogen and Goldberg made something sharp and soulful that’s part satire, part requiem. It mourns the magic while laughing at the madness of chasing it. You can feel the heartbreak behind the humor, and the rollercoaster ride of a dream that is both lost and yet also achieved.
And it took Apple—the biggest company in the world that literally makes your freakin’ phone!!!—to bankroll it. especially about the art of movie magic. Because in 2025, that’s what prestige storytelling about the art of movie magic needs to survive. The absurdity itself is uncanny.
If Entourage was about chasing the dream, The Studio is about what happens when the dream hits a marketing meeting and dies in a deck.
But then again, it’s still a dream. And to someone like Rogen’s Matt Remick, it’s the ultimate one, which gives it all the nobility in the world.
Who is The Studio for?
This show is for Film Twitter heads, Letterboxd lurkers, college film class survivors who can still define mise-en-scène, and AMC A-Listers who know what Dolby Atmos is and care deeply that you do too. It’s for the ones who argue PTA vs. Fincher like it’s religion, ride hard for Lynch, Coppola, and the Coen brothers, and still hold grudges over which Blade Runner cut counts as canon. That’s The Studio‘s tribe.
Rogen’s character, Matt Remick, spends the season torn between his love of cinema and the soul-crushing demands of corporate IP farming. The pilot opens with a pitch for a Martin Scorsese–directed Kool-Aid Man origin story inspired by Jonestown. While it’s ridiculous, it’s also somehow entirely plausible in the current era. Another episode featuring Sarah Polley drags the cultish obsession with one-takes, poking fun at the way industry folks worship them even when no one else cares.
The cameos are wild. Scorsese plays himself. There’s a Chinatown spoof with Zac Efron and Olivia Wilde. Ron Howard gets to be weird. There are power struggles over parking spots (…it’s an LA thing). It’s flex after flex, but it never feels gratuitous. Rogen’s earned the right. And the punches land because they come from a place of love and frustration.
So when Matt Remick shrugs and calls Entourage “a show beloved by millions,” it feels like a victory lap. A sly, knowing flex aimed right at a once-popular show that sent Turtle to call him ugly.
I’m not sure anyone is keeping score, but, at least for now, Rogen gets the last huh huh huh.
“Oh… yeah.” – Entourage theme song but also the Kool-Aid guy.
Content shared from brobible.com.