The Studio's 'The Oner' Tops a Crazy Month of One Shot Takes, Joining Daredevil: Born Again and Adolescence
The Studio joins Daredevil: Born Again and Adolescence in the month of one-take shots as chaos unfolds on the Seth Rogen-led Apple TV+ series.
This article contains spoilers for The Studio, and allusion to key plot points in Adolescence, and Daredevil: Born Again.
When a one-shot take begins, unless it’s been part of the marketing campaign for the TV show or movie, you likely don’t know it’s happening. But as that scene unfolds without the use of cuts, it turns into a dizzying magic trick, one that often helps elevate the piece of entertainment you’re consuming to a higher level based on the mere impressiveness of the technique involved. Disney+’s Daredevil: Born Again employed the one-shot with some digital trickery for its premiere fight scene. A week later, Adolescence wowed critics and dominated Netflix’s Top 10 with four intense episodes composed entirely of one shot each. And now, thanks to Apple TV+’s The Studio, we’ve got a hat trick, the perfect capper to this trilogy of March TV one-shots with an episode titled “The Oner” that completely obliterates the wonder of the one-shot take, while miraculously providing a wondrous – and hilarious – 26-ish minute long take itself.
Written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the second episode of the two-part premiere of The Studio follows new movie studio boss Matt Remick (also Rogen) and his best friend and VP Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz) as they visit the set of a new Sarah Polley movie, The Silver Lake, starring Greta Lee. Remick is giddy because Polley is filming a “oner,” aka a one-take shot, and as a cinema fan first and film exec second, he wants to be present for possible film history. Unfortunately, nobody else wants him to be there because having the studio boss – particularly one who is a disruptive, nervous wreck like Remick – on set will potentially play havoc with the delicate and time-sensitive nature of filming the shot.
Guess what happens? The episode is spiraling levels of hilarious tension, a perfect storm of brilliantly elevated comedy from expert performers like Rogen and Barinholtz, alongside Catherine O’Hara, Polly, and Lee that starts as a comedy of manners and ends with Remick completely obliterating the set of the movie, Three Stooges style. And that would be fun enough. But thanks to the movie-obsessed Remick, we also get an analysis of what makes one-shot takes work – and not work – as the show itself plays with the form.
That’s the essential trick of the one-shot take, that more often they’re not actually one shot. It’s ridiculously difficult to make a scene in a movie or TV show work perfectly even if you’re aiming for a singular shot of one person with a camera locked off on a tripod, let alone hundreds of extras, a moving Steadicam, or any sort of stunts. There are multiple techniques often employed to mask multiple shots to make them look like one shot, to allow more than one take in a “one-take” scene.
Though there are multiple examples of oners throughout history, the most famous example – and arguably the movie that made them famous – is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 thriller, Rope. The conceit of the film is that it happens in “real-time,” which is also not true – it’s supposed to take place over 80 minutes when it’s actually 100 minutes long. But Hitchcock shot the film to look like it was one, continuous take when in fact each take is between four and a half to 10 minutes long.
Part of the reason for this, beyond allowing for resetting of scenes, is that Hitchcock was restrained by two issues, both relating to film stock: one, he could only shoot up to 10 minutes at a time on film; and two, the projectionist needed to change reels every 20 minutes. The way Hitchcock accomplished this was by panning past objects, or having objects or people pass by his camera in a consistent manner. Having the camera briefly capture a man’s black jacket, for example, helps mask the cut between one shot and the next because the screen becomes black; and the “space” between one frame of film and another is also black, so the audience won’t notice the cut happening.
Later productions have stretched this further. 1982’s Macbeth filmed a 57-minute long, continuous take. Andy Warhol’s 1964 art film Empire was 485 minutes long, though that did mask the cuts.
And with the advent of the digital age, while we won’t say this has become easier, there are definitely more options. CGI has allowed filmmakers to digitally stitch together shots in a way that hopefully makes them look like one, continuous take. And digital itself has whisked away the issues Hitchcock had, with a shot given the potential to be as long as your hard drive has room for. 2023’s Paint Drying, an experimental film created as a protest to force the British Board of Film Classification to watch the filmmaker’s entire movie, is over 10 hours long.
Given that TV has a long history of live broadcasts, which ostensibly could make a oner relatively easier to achieve, it’s surprising that we haven’t seen more one-shot takes on the small screen; though perhaps the needs of advertising have prevented that, as they’re required to cut to commercials with regularity. But as TV budgets have grown, and streaming has taken over, more film techniques like the one-take shot have moved from cinemas to television. The first season of True Detective employed a six-minute-long tracking shot that wowed critics and fans of the HBO show in 2014. A year later, Netflix’s Daredevil was lauded for a jaw-dropping three-minute-long fight scene the show would top every season… Leading to a masterpiece just under 11-minute one-take scene set in a prison riot in Season 3 of the Marvel series. HBO took back the crown, though, in 2023 for a 27-minute take in a key episode of Succession where Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) children reacted to his sudden death.
There are plenty of other examples, from an episode of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House that uses five seemingly continuous takes to tell the story of Hill House over two time periods, to an episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia that shows Charlie Day absolutely losing it over seven harrowing (and hilarious) minutes. Point being, the one-take shot has become part of the language of TV in more recent years in a way that it wasn’t for most of its early history.
Which brings us back to March of 2025, TV’s Month Of Oners. It also raises the question of why we’ve gotten so many one-shot takes over such a short period. The simple answer is that they’re there for different reasons, so in some respects, it’s a coincidence. The more complicated answer is that TV has become so packed with TV shows, that anything buzzy like a one-take shot will hopefully make a series stand out from the pack.
For Daredevil: Born Again, they had done a one-take shot in every previous season of the series. And with the opening episode continuing – and somewhat ending – that story with the initial return of characters Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), it makes sense to have a visual call-out to those stand-out hallway fights from the previous three seasons and put them to rest alongside the law firm of Nelson, Murdock, and Page. While the scene is marred by more obvious digital stitching, it follows Daredevil (Charlie Cox) as he battles Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) through the bar Josie's, into a back room, up a stairway, and onto the roof -- before ending, punctuated by tragedy.
Adolescence’s stunning one-take shots serve a different purpose, beyond being technically impressive. Each hour-long episode is shot in one take without the use of CGI or the panning cuts pioneered by Hitchcock. Instead, the filmmakers filmed each episode 10-13 times, with multiple rehearsals for both actors and the crew. The result is you, the audience, are following the case of Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a 13-year-old accused of murdering a classmate, in real-time. The show itself is less concerned with the act than why Jamie did it, and how it ties into a culture of toxic masculinity that impacts young boys. By using one take, the show certainly embraces a “voyeuristic element,” but ultimately is about putting you in the same place as the Miller family as they piece together what Jamie did – and the fallout from his actions.
For The Studio, “The Oner” throws all of these techniques in a blender. It not only uses the one-take shot to amp up the comedic tension of the episode, as with the dramatic tension of Daredevil: Born Again, and puts us in the voyeuristic god-seat screaming at Remick to not do what we know he’s going to do, similar to moments in Adolescence. But The Studio episode also works as a de facto teaching tool about one-shot takes, and why they do and don’t work. It’s essentially Rogen and Goldberg doing a victory lap, almost quite literally: the episode begins with Remick and Saperstein driving in the former’s car to set and ends with them leaving the set, creating a visual loop, aka a bookend, something Remick notes he loves midway through the episode.
In the middle, we get brilliant bits like Remick wearing a suit to set, and then changing into an extra’s wardrobe so he can fit in with the more casual vibe, then getting mistaken for an extra later on – ruining the shot. They talk about using whip pans to mask a cut, something Polley says she doesn’t want to do, right as they use a whip pan to mask a cut. And Polley allows Remick on set merely because she desperately wants to include a Rolling Stones song in her movie, which will cost an additional $800,000. Not only does the episode end with them not getting the oner because of Remick’s accidental interventions, but what plays over the end credits? The Rolling Stones “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
The whole idea of the one-take shot is summed up early in The Studio episode, thanks to a conversation between the crasser Saperstein, and the more idealistic Remick.
“Oners are just so stupid,” Saperstein says. “It’s just the director jacking off while making everyone else’s lives miserable. Audiences do not care about this shit.”
“Are you kidding me?” Remick answers. “The oner is the ultimate cinematic achievement, you know? It’s like the perfect marriage of artistry and technicality… It’s also like a great storytelling tool, you know? You see Greta Lee’s character go from being confident to broken all in one take with no cuts? That’s perfect, you know?”
Beyond Remick saying “you know” a lot, that sums it up nicely. Saperstein isn’t necessarily wrong, that the prohibitively difficult one-take is a director showing off, as Rogen and Goldberg are doing here. But Remick is also correct that when done right, it is a combination of art and technique that can be used to elevate the storytelling of the episode. When Remick refers to Lee here, he’s of course presaging his own journey from confident studio head to a bloody mess fleeing set in disgrace at the end of the half-hour.
And yes, The Studio episode skewers the pretensions of a one-take shot, as the oner inside the oner doesn’t seem entirely necessary for the movie they’re making. But it also, like every episode of the series, celebrates film-making in all its forms. Rather than the hat trick of one-take shots this month serving as a skewering death knell for the technique, it’s a loving look at why they work. It’s impressive, for sure, from a fight scene in Daredevil: Born Again, to dramatic scenes in Adolescence, to comedic ones in The Studio. But beyond that, it pushes an already difficult task – making a TV show – to its absolute limits, and shows what a small village of people can create if they put their minds to it.
The oner is a magic trick. But it’s also the rare case where knowing how the trick is done – like how we’re shown the gears falling out of the machine on The Studio – it becomes all the more impressive. And at its best, elevates the material. Remick may have ruined the final shot of The Silver Lake, but in the process, Rogen and Goldberg helped make TV history.
