Wright-mania: why American TV series can't resist Frank Lloyd Wright

From the fifth installment ofThe Bear to the fictional architecture of The Studio, the master of American architecture returns to the screens.

In the fourth season of The Bear, the award-winning series set in the restaurant world of Chicago, Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) drives up to Oak Park to visit the first house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. It was 1889, and Wright was only 22 years old.

Another series, however, did more: The Studio, the satirical comedy about the Hollywood industry, sets much of the story in a Wright building that ... does not exist. The headquarters of Continental Studios, the production company headed by Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), is housed in fictional architecture inspired by the real Ennis House in Los Angeles. An homage all the more powerful precisely because it is fictional.

Seth Rogen, Evan Golberg, The Studio, 2025. Courtesy Apple TV+

Not that Wright is missing on screen: the Ennis House appears in Blade Runner from '82, in many David Lynch's films and is said to have inspired the palace of Meereen in Game of Thrones. The Guggenheim in New York City and the Marin County Civic Center also appear in The International (2009) and Gattaca (1997), respectively.

With The Bear and The Studio, however, things get more interesting. In The Bear 's fifth episode ("Replicants") the walls of Wright's famous studio house, now a museum open to the public, serve as the backdrop for one of the turning points of the entire series. Carmy decides to switch to a set menu. Okay, it may seem like a no-brainer, but for a chef it is a momentous choice. In this shift, Wright's architecture plays a sacred role. 


Carmy stops the car in front of the facade of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio and tours it like any other tourist while--alternating with the footage--scrolling through archival photographs of the house, including some of Wright's children and first wife along with a Christmas tree decorated in the center of the living room. In the background So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright by Simon & Garfunkel, which Paul Simon wrote in 1970 as a tribute to the architect (he actually knew next to nothing about Wright, but that's another story). 

For Carmy, a talented and troubled Chicago chef, Wright's architecture is a way to open his eyes to another side of his city that, in the hustle and bustle of big kitchens, he had forgotten: Chicago as seen through the windows of Wright's studio is slow, historic, enduring and cathartic. 

Christopher Storer, The Bear, season four, 2025. Courtesy Fx

In The Studio, however, Wright's sacred aura dissolves into irony. The building envisioned as a "temple of cinema"-which in fiction Wright would have designed in 1927-resembles the Ennis House and was recreated by superimposing its facade on the Warner Bros Television Building in Burbank. The interiors, built on set and retouched in CGI, were designed by set designer Julie Berghoff as a mix of Wright, pre-Columbian architecture and 1940s-50s Hollywood.


At the beginning of the first episode, the protagonist enters the studio and passes a guide who is telling the history of the building to visitors. With his assistant he comments, "A temple of cinema, huh? And they want me to make movies out of wooden blocks." Throughout the series we will see an extreme contrast: between the film industry-the now unartistic seventh art -and the monumentality of a true master's work. 

Seth Rogen, Evan Golberg, The Studio, 2025. Courtesy Apple TV+

For Carmy, the wunderkind chef who fled New York, Frank Lloyd Wright is a renunciation of the performative obsession of fine dining, where every dish must impress, in order to embrace a calm equilibrium, the same he feels when he visits 951 Chicago Ave in Oak Park. For Matt Remick - a film official with artistic ambitions - Wright's fictional architecture, on the other hand, is a symbol of what is wrong around him, of what, in a sense, he aspired to be and never will be: independent. Above all, it is a Hollywood fiction.