It’s fitting that the title of the new HBO comedy “The Franchise” makes no direct reference to the superhero movie around which it revolves. That would be “Tecto: Eye of the Storm,” a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar work in progress that has already been deemed an also-ran by its Marvel-like studio. The executives view it as a money grab—an opportunity to dangle before fans a three-minute cameo by a character from one of the studio’s more popular tentpoles in the hope that they bite. Accordingly, no one actually working on “Tecto” is thrilled about being there, regarding it, instead, as a means to an end. The film’s lead actor, Adam (Billy Magnussen), is betting that it’ll be the vehicle that catapults him onto the A-list. The producer, Anita (Aya Cash), wants its success to open doors for her to make “actual movies,” with the likes of Sofia Coppola. The very German director, Eric (Daniel Brühl), nurses fantasies that the film, which is set on a distant planet populated by fish-human hybrids, will offer meaningful commentary on fracking, or feminism—he hasn’t really decided, but perhaps he’ll have done so by the time he figures out the ending, a feat he attempts, sporadically, between takes. Most of the people ostensibly in charge are just there to pay their dues, meaning that no one sees it as his or her responsibility to insure that “Tecto” is any good.
If “The Franchise” ’s premise of small-time machinations on the fringe of the big time makes it sound like a Hollywood version of “Veep,” that may be by design. The show’s creator is Jon Brown, a former “Veep” producer, and it counts among its executive producers Armando Iannucci, the creator of the earlier series. The two shows share plots of frenzy amid insignificance, and both abound with florid insults, rapid-fire banter, and acid appraisals. (One of Adam’s co-stars bristles at having been given little to do in front of the camera that day except “silently nodding, like a wife at a party.”) Above all, the two comedies are united in a bone-deep cynicism that can be unexpectedly invigorating; “Veep” seldom saw anything worthwhile in politics, and “The Franchise” doesn’t bother asking what kinds of pleasures comic-book tales might provide, which itches they may scratch. Across eight episodes, the début season doesn’t furnish enough details about “Tecto” to add up to a logline. It doesn’t care. It’s a series for the haters.
Is its appeal too narrow? That’s a question I kept returning to as I watched the first few episodes, which sometimes felt as if they were primarily meant to elicit grim chuckles of recognition within the industry itself. (I thought it strained credulity that Eric would have begun rolling the cameras on such a costly production without finalizing the script, but friends in the business, instant fans of the show, have told me that this wasn’t unrealistic at all.) The subplots feature a litany of labor issues, some ripped from the headlines: overworked VFX artists, car accidents after long days on set, skin inflammation from costumes attached with toxic adhesives. An episode in which Anita has to “woman the woman problem”—that is, clean up the mess that her male predecessors made in sidelining female characters so often that the studio became notorious for it—tackles a quandary that’s less overt but more pernicious.
The show ingratiates itself with viewers by displaying undiluted contempt for how Marvel and DC have diminished the movies, but, at this phase in the franchise-fatigue cycle, satirizing superhero clichés feels like shooting fish-people in a barrel with Homelander’s laser eyes. The targets are accurate but well worn: the male stars are pressured to look inhumanly chiselled, the fandom’s over-the-top misogyny would be funny if it weren’t so scary, and, for all their narrative convolutions, these films mostly exist to get to the B.F.O.G.T.—the Big Fight Over Glowy Thing. The territory is so familiar that “The Franchise” initially feels like part of the same Hollywood ouroboros it’s mocking: a phenomenon gets big, copycats rush in and flood the zone until diminishing returns set in, a lazy parody takes aim at the laziness of the phenomenon’s tropes. You might agree with the show’s points, but it’s not much fun having your disdain spat back at you.
One reason “The Franchise” gets off to a slightly disappointing start is that it takes a while before the characters get fleshed out into something beyond archetypes. Anita’s liaison to the studio, Pat (Darren Goldstein), is a proud philistine who mistakes Ingmar Bergman for an unknown superhero named Berg Man. The actors are stupid and vain or stupid and greedy. Adam takes experimental steroids prescribed by a doctor peddling his own cryptocurrency, and the actor who plays his onscreen nemesis, Peter (Richard E. Grant), uses his time off to film commercials for the Libyan tourism board. (In a running joke, neither star is able to describe the plot of the movie.) The thankless task of corralling all these personalities falls on the first assistant director, Daniel (Himesh Patel), who’s too busy trying to keep the production on schedule to let himself care about the story they’re telling. When the film’s new third assistant director, Dag (Lolly Adefope), notes that Adam looks asinine miming the invisible jackhammer wielded by his character, Daniel quickly shuts her down. “We don’t have an opinion, O.K.?” he insists. “We just keep the trains running. Who cares what’s on them?”
Of course, he has to care, eventually. Usually, when stamping out the various fires that flare up on set, his preferred method is just to lie, but he gradually lets slip the fact that he’s probably the only person on the project who feels an attachment to Tecto lore. It’s with this belated blossoming, about halfway through the season, that “The Franchise” reveals its real aspirations: to be not a series of easy jabs at superhero silliness but a tragicomic portrayal of a workplace overrun by fear and paralysis, in which initiative is discouraged and compliance enforced. “The Franchise” never stops lampooning the superhero stuff, but as the characters evolve their world starts to feel less insular. “The Office” was about an environment that demanded teeth-grinding patience; one had to grin and bear it while the boss made an ass of himself and forced everyone to watch. Here, the power hierarchy is much more unyielding. Anita gets her orders via Pat from an offscreen studio exec who won’t take her calls anymore; if she doesn’t obey, she risks never working again. The same exec unilaterally decides that the fish-people are to be killed off in the film that precedes “Tecto” in the franchise, leaving Eric scrambling, as the finned folk were to carry much of the “thematic luggage” in his script. From Pat on down, the cast and crew are made to feel as if they have little to no control; they’ll also be punished for screwing up.
One of Iannucci’s signature moves is to explore how far people are willing to go along with something they know to be absurd, until they end up in some pretty dark depths. In certain ways, “The Franchise” is no exception. But it’s not unremittingly pessimistic, either, granting Daniel the possibility of real input in a genre notorious for stifling idiosyncrasy and authorship. Other characters develop alongside him—in particular, Adam, whose softness shines through his insecurities, and Dag, whose incessant, often delusional cheerfulness finally clinches her a true win. Even the unseen studio bigwig has some of his godlike impregnability chipped away. Hearing that Martin Scorsese has said franchise movies “killed cinema” (a fictional exaggeration of views that Scorsese has expressed in real life), the exec is stricken with guilt. Pat concedes, “We ran the data, and we think he might be right.” ♦
