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The Franchise Isn’t Super Satire, But It Is a Fun Hang
Veep’s Armando Iannucci sends up superhero fatigue with a workplace comedy that thrives when it’s not succumbing to cynicism.
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. 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.
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