To most normal and reasonable viewers, Seth Rogen’s ambitious and funny new show The Studio will come across as a workplace farce shot through with both Hollywood glamour and a healthy dose of satire, following the misadventures and mishaps of Matt Remick (Rogen), a newly promoted studio head who must balance his desire to do good work with his desire not to get fired by financially motivated bosses. But to the movie nerds that the show is about, made by, and aimed at, there’s more going on; the show is absolutely chockablock with references and homages, both general and specific – sometimes, to a certain brand of nerd, to the point of confusion.

The biggest example emerges right out front, during the show’s first episode. Matt is summoned to the office of studio CEO Griffin Mill to learn of his promotion (and the firing of his mentor, Patty, played by Catherine O’Hara). If the name Griffin Mill sounds familiar, you might be a cinephile; that’s also the name of the Tim Robbins’ studio exec character in The Player, Robert Altman’s seminal 1992 satire of the film business. If you are cursed with the aforementioned cinephilia, hearing the name “Griffin Mill” before the character is visible on screen perhaps sets up the expectation that Rogen, obviously a movie geek himself, may be implying that this is a version of that character years later.

This would certainly give the CEO an appropriately dark backstory; The Player is about Griffin Mill, a studio exec in a position much like Rogen’s character at the beginning of the series, murdering a screenwriter who he thinks is blackmailing him. He ultimately gets away with the killing, gives his actual blackmailer a movie deal, and winds up head of the studio anyway – the position Matt Remick attains in the first episode of The Studio. So it would follow that Griffin had eventually ascended to corporate CEO status after a long tenure as the head of one or more studios.

But when we do see Griffin Mill in The Studio, he’s not played by Tim Robbins, nor does he much look like a 2025 version of that character. Rather, he’s played by Bryan Cranston, done up more like a ’70s-style mogul, matching the general ’70s-influence aesthetic of the series. (He looks a little bit like Robert Evans.) Later in the series, we find out Mill’s age, and it doesn’t particularly match up with how old Griffin Mill from The Player would be today, either. So, he’s probably not the same character, but he has the exact same name, presumably as an homage to that film.

This makes sense, as there are other similarities between The Player and The Studio: They’re both packed with cameos (The Player’s roster is so impressive that much of it is still instantly recognizable over 30 years later: Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis, John Cusack, Susan Sarandon, Burt Reynolds, Nick Nolte, and Anjelica Huston all appear as themselves, among others, while The Studio has Charlize Theron, Martin Scorsese, Olivia Wilde, Sarah Polley, Adam Scott, Zac Efron, Ron Howard, and Zoë Kravitz on deck). And they both employ showy tracking shots; The Player opens with a now-famous eight-minute single take, while The Studio composes each of its individual scenes in a single roving-camera take. They’re both self-referential about this quality, too; during the opening shot of The Player, a character mentions the six-and-a-half-minute tracking shot that opens Touch of Evil, while The Studio’s second episode is all about the headache of trying to compose a tricky “oner,” itself assembled from a series of oners. Clever stuff.

And also potentially maddening! Rogen and his co-director Evan Goldberg are obviously constructing a playful satire here, and it’s not – sorry, future YouTube videos – a secret sequel to The Player. But the show’s winks and homages are sometimes more confusing than enlightening. Cranston’s Griffin Mill is certainly venal and profit-obsessed, but he doesn’t have quite the same chilly countenance of the Robbins version, nor does Rogen’s Matt really fit that image, either. His frantic attempts to maintain some level of artistic integrity owe more to another single-take experiment: Birdman, whose percussive, anxiety-driving score The Studio also imitates.

There’s nothing wrong with mixing and matching influences, of course, and The Studio is frequently wonderful to look at; it has more energy and verve than many feature films. Some of the satirical shots Rogen and company take at studio filmmaking, particularly in the creation of franchises nobody asked for, is sharp. But The Player is a pitch-black comedy about an executive who literally gets away with murder, and Birdman is an existential freakout over self-perceived artistic integrity. The Studio has hints of both, but it’s mostly frantic crisis management somewhere between Veep and The Office. (Great shows both, of course, at least in their respective primes.) It’s a potent reminder that Altman himself once casually mentioned that he thought the satire of The Player was relatively tame. The Studio, for all of its clever observations, doesn’t even reach that level of malice or moral rot, and doesn’t feel especially Altmanesque, either. Of course it can’t feature the “real” Griffin Mill; in a lot of ways, this is The Player, rebooted. It’s the curse of the movie nerd to know this.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.