The Studio gets key fact wrong about the Jonestown massacre

The Studio is a Hollywood satire that stars Seth Rogen as the head of a movie studio, but in Episode 1, the show makes a common mistake about the Jonestown massacre.

New Apple TV+ sitcom The Studio is the brainchild of longtime collaborators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, as well as their co-creators Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez.

Rogen plays series lead Matt Remick, who lands his dream job of running Continental Studios at the start of the first episode, meaning he now has the power to green-light movies.

But in Episode 1, he’s also pressured by new Continental CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) to make a film about the Kool-Aid Man, which is when Remick’s problems begin, and also when the show gets a major detail about the Jonestown tragedy wrong.

They didn’t drink the Kool-Aid at Jonestown

Remick initially meets with director Nicholas Stoller to discuss an animated Kool-Aid movie. But then he speaks to Martin Scorsese, who wants to make a film about the Jonestown massacre, at which point, Remick sees an opportunity.

That’s because many of the murders and suicides presided over by Jim Jones during the 1978 massacre were the result of drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. So Remick convinces Scorsese to call his movie ‘Kool-Aid’ and boom, he’s making an arthouse movie, but one that features the product that his boss demands.

Trouble is, while there might have been Kool-Aid in Jonestown, the overwhelming evidence points to the victims dying by drinking Flavor Aid laced with poison. It was a similar, cheaper drink at the time, but very much not Kool-Aid.

The tragedy nevertheless helped popularise the phrase “don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” much to the consternation of that company’s marketing team. But in recent years – thanks to photos of boxes and chests filled with Flavor Aid in Jonestown – it’s become widely known that Kool-Aid was not the deadly beverage of choice.

One would have thought Matt Remick would know that, and the same goes for Scorsese, with him being a stickler for detail and someone who’s written a Jonestown script in the show.

But The Studio chooses to shoot the legend rather than stick to the facts, and to be honest, we can’t blame them, as the Kool-Aid conceit is a very good gag, one that anchors a terrific opening episode.

The first two episodes of The Studio are now streaming on Apple TV+. Head here for our list of the best TV shows of all-time, and here for the best TV shows of 2025 so far.