Hollywood loves a navel-gazing satire about the movie business. Audiences do too, when given a good reason, from the upbeat mockery of 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” to the excoriation of a studio executive in 1992’s “The Player,” to the empty platitudes about representation in 2023’s “American Fiction.” But don’t look for any of that wit or bite in HBO’s eight-episode series “The Franchise,” which is little more than the TV equivalent of a boiled piece of chicken.
“Tropic Thunder” might actually be the better comparison. The 2008 comedy was premised on the idea that filmmaking isn’t a miracle of controlled chaos, it’s just chaos. But at least it had things to say about hubris and bad judgment, whereas there are no ideas animating “The Franchise.” Just as crucially, the jokes don’t land, maybe because the show also lacks the courage to bite the hand that feeds.
Creator Jon Brown’s credits include “Veep” (from Armando Iannucci, who is also an executive producer here) and “Succession” (created by another Iannucci alum, Jesse Armstrong) and those titles might be selling points for some, but I’m not sure the smug, fast-talking snark that defines this style of comedy has legs. We can disagree, but if you watched HBO’s short-lived and far less acclaimed “Avenue 5” — yet another Iannucci project that Brown worked on — you have a sense of what “The Franchise” has in mind, which is very little at all.
Somewhere in England, a cast and crew are at work on a superhero movie called “Tecto: Eye of the Storm” and the tunnel vision of a crass Kevin Feige-esque studio executive (Darren Goldstein) has him making all kinds of harsh, panic-driven dictates. “Without our tentpole, we don’t have a tent,” he says, “and without a tent, we get eaten in our sleep by 9-year-old TikTok kids with superhero fatigue, which is not a real illness and a scam.” Instead of understanding the job at hand, the director (Daniel Brühl) treats this formulaic megaproject with the seriousness of Shakespeare.
