HBO’s ‘The Franchise’ Is Kryptonite for Superhero Movies That Take Themselves Too Seriously
From I Love Lucy to The Larry Sanders Show and beyond, writers in the performing arts have always set stories in the world of show business they know so well. (Even Hamlet makes a pretty memorable scene out of the titular character trying his hand at directing.) Naturally, with superhero movies crowding out all other genres, the process of making them is a target fit not just for fictional dramatization, but for savage mockery. Depending on whether you’ve ever added up how much you’ve spent on tickets to predictable movies about deeply mid comic book characters, you might think HBO’s new satire The Franchise — from some of England’s most eloquent and gifted insult craftsmen — doesn’t go hard enough.
In The Franchise’s series premiere, which airs on Sunday, October 6th, we join the production of a movie called Tecto: The Eye of the Storm on Day 30 of 117. Also joining the production that day is Dag (Lolly Adefope), its new second assistant director. In a one-take shot — something with which director and series co-creator Sam Mendes has some expertise — Dag meets up with Daniel (Himesh Patel), the first AD, and gets a primer in all the aspects of the process that he has to supervise. The information flying at Daniel includes but is not limited to: an extra having a bad reaction to the latex makeup that’s transformed him into one of the “fish people”; news that Maximum Studios is worried Eric (Daniel Brül), the director they’ve hired away from art-house films, is going to make Tecto too dark, both literally and figuratively; and Peter (Richard E. Grant), who’s playing the movie’s villain, wants to tell Daniel a joke in which “a transsexual goes into a sauna.”
For a moment, it seems as though a fire on the studio stage will challenge Daniel’s calm competence, but no, it’s just some nearby residences. “Please ignore the burning houses,” he yells to the crew at large. This is advice he might need to start yelling at himself. In the days ahead, he’ll learn that Dag has no compunction about wondering aloud how soon A.I. will take over and rob them all of their livelihood, or to what degree they’re personally responsible for the death of cinema.
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Co-creator Armando Iannucci comes to The Franchise from not just one but two of the greatest political satires of our time: The Thick of It (set in the British Parliament) and Veep (revolving around the woman who occupies the show title’s thankless position). In that politics is, as the truism goes, show business for ugly people, Iannucci’s experience running comedies about politics perfectly prepared him to portray the complex power dynamics among all the personalities on the set — and, in the case of Shane, seemingly the Kevin Feige of Maximum Studios, very much off the set.
Adam (Billy Magnussen), who plays the titular Tecto, demands a degree of deference as the face of the franchise and #1 on the call sheet. But he’s subject to the artistic whims of Eric, his director, and also feels faintly inferior to Peter, #2 on the call sheet but with the more impressive acting pedigree. Eric is officially the final word on what makes it onto film, but he’s also intermittently aware that Daniel is managing up, using both his knowledge of the comic book source material and a past relationship with their new producer, Anita (Aya Cash). Everyone might snobbishly disdain Pat (Darren Goldstein), the “toy man,” but they also know he has a direct line to Shane — as does Bryson (Isaac Powell), nominally an assistant, but — since he’s Shane’s assistant — possibly the most powerful person on set. (The show’s third co-creator is Jon Brown, formerly of Fresh Meat and Succession, and thus no stranger to fast-moving scenes in which characters effortlessly trade putdowns so devastating they’d drive any real person to self-harm.)
Superhero movies having seemingly arrived at their flop era, roasting them might almost be considered punching down. What helps The Franchise avoid smugness is that it takes the genre just seriously enough. A major contributory element: how expensive everything looks. Whereas other recent sitcoms, like the latest seasons of Party Down and Hacks, have also mined jokes from the proliferation of superhero media, they limited their material to a few poster mockups; The Franchise shows us stages with enormous set pieces and locations with dozens of extras. (If some of the costumes look a little chintzy, it’s worth whatever they saved to meet Grant’s and Magnussen’s quotes — and to fly Nick Kroll to the U.K. to play Maximum’s phlegmiest superhero, The Gurgler.)
It’s very clear that virtually no one involved in making Tecto believes it will be an important cinematic achievement; Pat is pretty frank in his view that Eric’s artistic ambitions can only hurt the final product. But that doesn’t mean they can’t also be invested in making it work, for reasons that are cynical or sincere or a mix of both. Anita’s on her first major assignment for the studio and needs to make sure she doesn’t end up in producer jail. Eric, who got his start directing commercials, can’t go backward and become a laughingstock among his peers. Adam fears being the figurehead of a high-profile failure. Peter just hopes to reach a level of fame where he could get canceled — “Every day’s a Saturday when you’re canceled” — whereas now he’s in an echelon where no one cares how appalling he is: “The sleaze is priced in with me.”
Daniel might be the only one who understands the real joy these movies bring fans. He also dreams of directing his own movie one day, and the compromises he is pushed into making to keep the production on track are alternately hilarious and chilling — but then again, how high might the quality of life be for certain species of wildlife if Maximum Studios had never encroached on their habitats? Who can say!
Superhero movies have become so inescapable that it can sometimes feel like a new one just gets extruded from a content factory every four weeks, untouched by human hands. What The Franchise does so well is show how many tiny decisions have to be made in order for these movies to reach us — sometimes out of great conviction, and sometimes just so the crew can get three hours of sleep before coming back to finish covering a glowing MacGuffin with the last few ounces of shiny paint in northern Europe.
Just because it’s easy to shit on superhero movies doesn’t mean we shouldn’t — and after you watch The Franchise, you will definitely feel free to shit on the next real one with a deeper understanding of who and how it ended up being so bad.
