A career writer in other people's rooms, from Frasier to Veep, who finally co-created something of his own with The Studio: fluent, well-observed satire of institutions that is fond of its targets, sometimes more fond than it should be.
Fi1m perspective
The executives in The Studio (2025) love films. That is the whole engine of the thing. They can recognise a good idea when it walks into the office and they know, before the meeting is over, that the business will not let them make it. Alex Gregory has said where that came from: a meeting Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg once had with an executive who told them he had got into the business because he loved films, and now his job was to ruin them. It is the joke Gregory has been near for most of his working life, people inside an institution who know exactly what they ought to do and cannot.
He started as a gag writer on Late Show with David Letterman in 1996 and 1997, drew cartoons for The New Yorker, and then spent the late 1990s and early 2000s on the staffs of Frasier, The Larry Sanders Show and King of the Hill. We rate all three highly, and we will be honest about the limit of that: a staff writer's lines cannot be picked out of a series like that, and we will not pretend to. What we can say is that The Larry Sanders Show, with its staff working flat out to keep one needy man calm, is the nearest ancestor of The Studio, and Gregory was in that room. Later he wrote and produced on Veep for its fifth, sixth and seventh seasons, which by our count covers two of its good years and the loud one.
His longest partnership is with Peter Huyck, whom he met at Stanford. Together they co-wrote and co-directed a feature, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (2011), and co-created White House Plumbers (2023), which tells the Watergate story from the side of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. We have not reviewed it. Reviews at the time were divided over whether it held its tone between farce and history, and that is a criticism worth keeping in mind, because the same question hangs over the work we have seen.
The Studio is where we can judge him properly, and our verdict was warm with a reservation. The scripts, written with Huyck, Rogen, Goldberg and Frida Perez, are tight and often painfully funny, because the characters' love of the work makes every compromise more embarrassing. We laughed a great deal, and somewhere past the halfway mark we were tired, because each episode winds the panic higher and none of them makes anyone pay for it. The affection that gives the series its sting is also what lets everybody off. A harder writer would have picked a victim.
Gregory has never been a hard writer, and there is no sign he wants to be. He is a craftsman of the well-run room, someone who makes the machinery of a good comedy turn without drawing attention to himself. A second season of The Studio is coming. We would like it to be a little crueller, and we suspect it will be a little kinder.
Biography
Alex Gregory is an American writer and producer for television and film. He began his career as a gag writer for the Late Show with David Letterman (1996–1997) and contributed cartoons to The New Yorker.
His television writing credits include episodes of Frasier (1998–1999), The Larry Sanders Show (1998), King of the Hill (2000–2003) and Veep (2016–2019). He co-created the miniseries White House Plumbers (2023) and co-created and co-wrote the series The Studio (2025) with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck and Frida Perez.
Gregory has received four Primetime Emmy Awards, including for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for The Studio, as well as multiple Emmy wins and nominations for Veep.
