HBO Premieres Superhero Satire Comedy

One of the things about comic book movies being the commercially dominant art form of the past couple of decades is that the genre has also been the most discussed and critiqued. This makes it very difficult for a genre already designed to be all-caps to still have any remaining minutiae left to expose or dissect.

The challenges of finding new elements to pick apart within the world of caped heroes — or within the behind-the-scenes world of filmmaking, for that matter — are platformed in The Franchise. 

Despite hailing from Succession and Veep veteran Jon Brown, with Armando Iannucci and Sam Mendes among its producers, the comedy series very quickly becomes The Deadline Comments Section for Any Story About Marvel Movies: The TV Show. It has that level of insight and that level of unfolding momentum, complete with so many references to Deadline that you’d think Deadline‘s parent company (also known as THR‘s parent company) was a producer. 

It is not. But The Franchise does come from HBO, corporate sibling to DC Comics and the company behind many recent press releases trumpeting the success of the new DC Studios-produced drama The Penguin. It will either bother you or it won’t that under the guise of lampooning “comic book movies” or “contemporary filmmaking,” the show is probably 90 percent targeting Marvel. It’s less “biting the hand that feeds it” and more “biting the obnoxious neighbor’s hand and then playfully licking the hand the feeds it.” 

There are too many extraordinarily talented people involved with The Franchise, on both sides of the camera, for it not to be occasionally scathing in funny and well-constructed ways, at least for a few episodes. By the second half of the season, though, it becomes less and less focused, less and less narratively interesting and more and more satirically banal.

Himesh Patel plays Daniel Kumar, first assistant director on Tecto: Eye of the Storm, a new comic-based feature from Maximum Studios. All is not well for the blockbuster-churning juggernaut, which has nowhere to go but down after too many high-profile Comic-Con announcements. Between alleged superhero fatigue and several failed attempts at token diversity, Maximum is in need of fresh blood.

Tecto, about a hero with an invisible jackhammer and gloves that cause earthquakes, is unlikely to be that, despite the presence of artistically ambitious German auteur Eric (Daniel Brühl) behind the camera, up-and-coming leading man Adam (Billy Magnussen) as star and theater legend Peter (Richard E. Grant) as … I think he’s the villain? It’s hard to tell.

As those in the know are aware, the first AD often has the most important job on the set. Daniel is stuck handling Eric’s ego, Adam’s insecurity and Peter’s growing antipathy. When the project loses its producer, the replacement turns out to be Daniel’s ex-girlfriend Anita (Aya Cash). She proves less willing than her predecessor to provide insulation between the production and rampaging studio executive Pat (Darren Goldstein), whom the entire target audience will recognize as a cross between Kevin Feige and Jeph Loeb, right down to various mannerisms and catchphrases.

Daniel needs help, but none comes in the form of newly arrived Dag (Lolly Adefope). She’s described as a third AD at some point, but she seems closer to a production assistant — except one who keeps interrupting her bosses, complaining about the film she’s on and trying to wrangle for an executive producer credit. Her ongoing employment seems nonsensical, particularly since no effort is made to explain anything about her other than that she has an art history degree or something. “Degrees” in The Franchise are only mentioned when characters want to illustrate how superior they are to the thing they’re working on.

Since I have very little stake in the Marvel/DC rivalry, I’m fully capable of understanding why Brown and the Franchise writers chose to focus on the travails at Marvel. DC Studios has given the impression of being adrift during this fecund period, while Feige in particular has publicly and hubristically embodied Marvel’s powerful rudder. It’s funnier and more iconoclastic to make fun of a thing that gives the possibly false impression of being steered than to wallow in the uncertainty of a brand that exists in a permanent state of recasting Superman and Batman. At times, however, the evasion of anything mockable related to DC at the expense of anything mockable related to Marvel actually feels willful. 

There’s also very little that this comedy finds humorous, about either its chosen genre or its Hollywood milieu, that you couldn’t have lampooned on social media 10 years ago — or that hasn’t already been a target on shows like The Boys, The Other Two, Reboot, Extras, Episodes, as well as entirely too many films. Like, do you remember Judd Apatow’s The Bubble, a COVID-era franchise sendup that premiered on Netflix in 2022 and has, by collective cultural decree, been forgotten entirely? There were multiple times watching The Franchise when I thought, “Huh, The Bubble made basically the same joke and might have done it better.”

It isn’t that the targets aren’t fertile, and it surely isn’t that Iannucci and Brown and the other writers don’t know how to lacerate those targets with profane glee — though if you’ve watched enough of The Thick of It and Veep and Succession, it’s hard to believe that nobody has referred to a noxious moneyman as “Scrooge McFuck” previously. If you saw Iannucci’s more hit-or-miss Avenue 5 and felt the previously reliable obscenity-driven dialogue formula was beginning to reveal some cracks, this won’t change your mind. 

When The Franchise actually does narrow in on its targets with precision, it works decently. An episode featuring Katherine Waterston as an Oscar-nominated actress whose token cameo is fleshed out in hilarious fashion because of Maximum’s “women problem” reminded me of the Globby/Pixar storyline in The Other Two, in a good way. A chapter in which Eric’s resistance to product placement nearly starts a war with China has moments of silly inspiration.

But one in which everybody gets caught up in another Martin Scorsese comment about superhero flicks killing cinema is thoroughly tepid. And another in which everybody is intimidated by the possible arrival of Christopher Nolan on set makes no sense at all, especially when Nolan is treated exclusively as a powerful but arty director and not as a man who’s directed and/or produced a BUNCH of features for DC. Several jokes about overworked VFX artists are almost astonishingly tone-deaf and unamusing. 

Like Tecto itself, maybe The Franchise would hold together better if it had a more steady directing hand. But Mendes passes off the reins after a pilot made visually notable only by a few ambitious backstage tracking shots, which none of the subsequent directors attempt to replicate. Then again, repetition isn’t necessarily ideal. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score the premiere with what sound like outtakes from their Challengers score, and later installments find a different composer mimicking them mimicking themselves.

The series rapidly becomes a loose assemblage of on-the-nose snark, in part because none of the characters or their interpersonal relationships are defined clearly. Sure, everybody on Veep and Succession sounded a bit the same, but you knew in every situation where characters stood with each other and what drama or comedy you could get from each pairing.

Here, the variations mostly come in the form of how much a character shouts (nobody shouts better than Goldstein) and whether or not they’re embarrassed to be making a superhero movie (nobody is more embarrassed than Dag, which limits what the generally delightful Adefope has to play). That doesn’t go very far. 

Patel and especially Cash swear well, but they’re characters who have a lengthy past together and yet no dynamic at all. The show tries once or twice to suggest there might still be romantic tension between the two, but nobody here really has feelings.

Actually, Magnussen’s Adam is filled with one form of insecurity per episode, and as a result, his was the character I found myself liking the most by the end of eight half-hours — at least in that way you’re allowed to “like” any of the characters on Iannucci-produced projects. Magnussen and Grant spar well throughout, with frequent interjections from Brühl, whose off-kilter line readings reliably made me chuckle. 

I’m certain that there will be a solid-sized audience that will flock to this series happily. It’s chock-a-block with “Hey, I get that reference!” and “I’ve been on a set, so I’m familiar with that!” punchlines and, like I’ve said, they’re sometimes funny. Especially by the end, though, The Franchise amounts to not much more than superficial mockery of stuff some people like and other people are tired of.