The Franchise (Sky Comedy, Now) is a knives-out HBO/Sky satire in the tradition of Succession or Veep, in which the Hollywood sausage factory that stuffs endless superhero hero movies down the world’s gullet is viciously parodied. It is sharply written (show runner Jon Brown worked on Succession) and the cast – including Richard E Grant as a thespian stooping to playing a cackling villains and Daniel Brühl as an idiot auteur – get stuck in with verve.
But there is an entry price which is the insistence that you find superhero films ridiculous. But what if you don’t? What if you regard the best Marvel movies – Avengers: Endgame or Captain America: Civil War, for example – to be popcorn cinema at its finest? In that case, The Franchise might prove kryptonite and can be regarded as part of what might be seen as a broader backlash against nerd culture. It isn’t parodying geekdom so much as sneering at it and rolling its eyes.
Still, if you can look past the anti-nerd effrontery, it has lots of gusto. Himesh Patel is Daniel, an overworked assistant director trying to hold an Avengers-style fandango together largely by yelling into his walkie-talkie. Brühl, meanwhile, is the pretentious director who believes he’s too good for this dross and that a superhero flick requires bonus dollops of Mitteleuropa hauteur.
Life on set is one crisis after another. In episode one, Brühl’s Eric is forced to introduce more light to the sound stage – the studio feels it’s too dark and dreary – but when the new wattage is unveiled, his stars (including Grant’s Magneto-from-X-Men style baddy) suffer temporary blindness. The outlook is dark for Daniel, too, after the affable producer is sacked by a studio tyrant parachuted in to keep costs under control while Aya Cash’s Anita – with whom he has a troubled past – is brought in to help with the firefighting (Cash being a veteran of the superior satire, The Boys).
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The Franchise has a punchy energy, but there are shades of executive producer Armando Iannucci’s misdirected parody of the Soviet Union, The Death of Stalin. That film portrayed Moscow in the aftermath of the Great Terror and Stalin’s many purges as grand farce rather than the horror story it was – a flawed misunderstanding by Iannucci of the subject at hand and a misstep which is repeated here with a show that doesn’t know how to send up the behind the scenes process of making comic book movies because it so obviously looks down on the genre.
To properly poke fun at something, you have to appreciate it to some degree – as Quentin Tarantino shows with his lampooning of 1950s American cowboy shows in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino understood these shows were creaky and ridiculous but also loved them dearly. Whereas everyone involved in The Franchise obviously regards superhero films as a blot on the face of humanity. The result is a pastiche that doesn’t know what to do with its subject matter or even how to engage with it adequately.
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