The Studio

The studio is an evening TV show, watched by the characters in A Little Break.

It has a bunch of celebrities (usually with one or two big stars; often trying to prove themselves) trying to produce a TV show. They do current affairs, cookery, and other generic daytime TV segments. They have contact with outside broadcast units, but all studio content has to be filmed in the studio. This means that the celebs are both presenting, filming, and directing the show. It often allows some star to embarrass themselves, as there's nobody else to write their jokes for them. If they need an autocue, they need to write their lines in advance (or get another member of the team to write for them). They must also do all the editing, and budget for resources (including negotiating with sponsors and advertisers in some cases), all of which is filmed so that the audience can see the interesting bits.

There were a couple of water-cooler moments which everybody probably heard about even if they didn't watch the show. One was Tyler Walthamstone – who was already gaining a reputation of relying on writers to come up with his charming screen persona – proving that he could actually write entertaining banter and witty one-liners without problems, when he ended up writing a whole bunch of scripts for other celebs who didn't do well without an autocue. It turned out that he tends to go to pieces under pressure, so can't interview without the autocue, but is perfectly capable of writing his own lines if it's not live. Another was a famous TV chef doing a cookery segment in their usual way – a dozen attempts to prep the dish in advance until she came up with one that looked perfect, then special effects stuff to generate steam so it looks hot when she does the actual cooking segment. Apparently she didn't realise that the audience would also see a montage of the behind-the-scenes magic, and how many times she managed to burn the meals before they came out right.

In later seasons, various gimmicks were introduced. Such as a news segment where all the outside clips were submitted by members of the public on the website. In that case, the celebs could use a dedicated chat app to talk to the public, and had access to a limited Internet service which restricted current news – forcing them to work out for themselves which stories are true and which reporters are being honest with them. This led to some amusement when a group of fans from another forum managed to get enough bots on the chat to convince the stars that everybody in the outside world believed a story about NASA returning to Buzz Aldrin a wristwatch which he had inadvertently left on the moon in 1969. Other gimmicks included not allowing some or all of the celebs to leave the studio for weeks at a time, cutting them off from the real world, including a celebrity impersonator who the others were trying to identify, and having them cut and edit The Studio itself in a self-referential twist.