Photo: Colin Hutton/HBO
Can you believe that making superhero magic is a giant chore? Yes, probably, if you’ve paid more than minimal attention to anything beyond the cheery Comic-Con announcements hailing these movies as the best things ever. The making of a minor film named Tecto within the vast, expensive superhero universe of HBO’s The Franchise (no, not that one) is going poorly: Directors keep getting fired, projects are constantly in rewrites, no one can agree whether the movie is feminist or sexist, and the godlike personality steering it all keeps promising more to audiences while changing every detail behind the scenes. It’s obviously something very much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a bit of DC and Star Wars thrown in for good measure. Though the show’s creators (Jon Brown of Succession; Armando Ianucci, who sent up politics with Veep and The Thick of It; and director Sam Mendes, who served his own time in the franchise mines of James Bond) said in interviews that its events are based on real stories they’ve heard from set, The Franchise’s initial depiction skews more predictably archetypal than shocking.
Daniel (Station Eleven’s Himesh Patel) is a hard-working AD who’s trying to hold this movie together despite the general wackiness of its stars — Billy Magnussen as the movie’s doofy lead, hopped up on so much HGH he thinks he’s turning into a sheep, and Richard E. Grant as the sneering, willfully un-PC British stage talent in it for a paycheck — and incompetence of its director (Daniel Brühl, addicted to scarves, a bit for which I think Vulture deserves some credit) and screenwriter (Jessica Hynes, as an eternal yes-woman in a part that takes time to cohere). On the studio side, there’s Darren Goldstein, who plays a rowdy management stooge in a baseball cap, and while the universe’s Kevin Feige analogue named “Shane” is never seen, his messages are relayed by a harried assistant played by theater’s own Isaac Powell (a heartthrob onstage, but only functionary on TV). Producer Anita, played by Aya Cash, is brought in to get the ailing production over the finish line, even though she only sees it as stepping stone to serious films. She has a romantic past with Daniel, a layer of complication the show can’t figure out how make work and mostly abandons. The pilot opens with the arrival of his new second-in-command Dag, played by Lolly Adefope, who provides a somewhat stilted expository voice. Later, her line deliveries get funnier, though her detached observations haven’t yet resolved into a full character.
As the crew of Tecto launch into yet another week of filming The Franchise adapts complications familiar to those of us who’ve paid enough attention to how the sausage is made (this may be the first series designed explicitly for listeners of The Town), but it struggles to apply enough spin to make the satire take flight. In one installment, clearly inspired by the public treatment of actresses like Captain Marvel’s Brie Larson, the studio decides that, after being accused of sexism, they need to give Tecto’s female lead (played by Katherine Waterston) more power, before discovering that any deviation from comics lore could make diehard fans even more mad at her. It’s a great premise, leading to a funny scene where Daniel and company argue about what kind of device they can, contractually, give Waterston’s character without pissing off everyone else’s agents, and a good in-joke for fans of playwrights (Cash’s character suggests they could call in a woman named “Annie Herzog” to do a script pass for the publicity).
But where The Franchise succeeds in locating comedy in the superhero machine, it has trouble figuring out how to escalate and spins in circles. You want these specific people to heighten and charge the scenario, but they too often remain types: the brow-beaten AD, the callous producer, the delusional director all say exactly what you expect them to. Waterston, especially, is left without a good comedic game to play; her character is polite, sad, and trying really hard to leave the franchise in peace. Perhaps there’s a meta-failure in putting the actress on a pedestal but not letting her be as much of a megalomaniac as everyone else.
Daniel, too, could stand to be a bit crazier. Brown and Iannucci position Patel as one of the saner men in the room, but also one of the only characters who seems to care at all about the comics on which Tecto is based. That forces Patel to play, in some scenes, the over-it cynicism of a moviemaking bureaucrat lying to everyone in order to get things done, and in others, strains of geekiness and enthusiasm about what might be possible if not for all the meddling from above. That’s a tall task for any performer, even someone as innately relatable as Patel. Plus, with everyone else in The Franchise falling on the cynical side of the movie-making business, there’s an ingredient imbalance in the comedy recipe. The satire needs someone who’s a true believer in Tecto besides the conflicted main character, even if it’s obviously a stupid movie about a guy who can make earthquakes with an invisible drill. 30 Rock had Kenneth, Veep had Gary. Without that presence, The Franchise’s snootiness doesn’t have a good counterweight. If Daniel’s the only person who really cares about superheroes in The Franchise, it’s hard to believe he’s making callous decisions about shaving an extra’s body hair the week before his wedding.
But comedy takes time to gel, and as The Franchise progresses, it loosens, allowing the cast to find a lot more warmth, with a sillier vein that rewards its performers and universe. One episode, built around the ways American productions bend to conform to the Chinese markets, involves the Tecto team trying to incorporate propaganda about the quality of Chinese-made tractors into their science-fiction movie. The satire, as always, could cut more deeply — there’s no reference to censorship of homosexuality or Uyghur labor camps — but The Franchise comes up with some great, goofy tableaus in which tractors beep their way through soundstages. Later episodes also encourage an endearing idiocy from the cast: Magnussen is so good at both looking like a matinee idol and playing bro-y fragility (he’s got a killer line about how his father doesn’t talk to him except to rate his films two stars on Letterboxd), while Brühl, so often asked to play scheming Nazi-types in American film, turns out to excel at playing indoor-boy dweebiness (he frets for an episode about whether Christopher Nolan, visiting the set for the day, will like his giant fireball).
The show gets so much better when it’s not about characters insisting they’re better than the shit they’re shoveling and instead revel in said shit. That’s when they become people you actually like spending time with. The series has a lot of fun with Superstore-esque cutaways to whatever nonsense is happening among the crew around the set — the shots of the prop team spray-painting increasingly humongous gems to please Brühl’s director are particularly harrowing — and later in the season, there are some C-plots that land just right, like Powell’s assistant herding a Make-A-Wish visitor who turns out to be a large adult man with long COVID to set. Daniel as a character starts working better once he’s more actively Machiavellian, in that Patel becomes more compelling when there’s a wild glint in his eye. That also tends to enliven his back and forth with Cash, even if she is too often asked to mumble disappointedly about how she shouldn’t be there because she has a master’s in literature.
As Tecto flounders in production, they propose recutting the movie (with the help of an overworked VFX guy, natch) to totally reverse the tone, making it seem more like a rousing action-adventure than a serious film with Things to Say. It’s a note The Franchise itself seems to have taken midstream. The comedy grows into itself when it’s not sneering at the bad system and instead becomes a good hang with kooky characters stuck in that bad system. And once they’re pitching those changes to the all-powerful Shane? I found myself rooting for Tecto to succeed, even if I’ve given up going to see actual Marvel movies.
