‘The Franchise’: Almost Too Spot-On to be a Satire

What went wrong with superhero movies? This seems to be the big pop culture question of our age, although it’s not exactly one that needs a sophisticated answer. As hard as it may be to believe now, Hollywood used to simply stop making movies based on certain genre trends when those trends lost popularity. Regardless, The Franchise on Max  manages to provide a relatively sophisticated explanation. The half-hour dramedy posits a superhero movie production, doomed less because the superhero concept is stupid, even if it obviously is, so much as because the people behind the actual production manages it in a pointlessly antagonistic way, with increasingly arbitrary demands by the studio representative Pat (Darren Goldstein) racking up costs and destroying morale on Tecto for little apparent purpose except to enforce the hierarchy of the larger franchise.

The main perspective character for The Franchise is the first assistant director Daniel (played by Himesh Patel), who effectively sums up the ethos of The Franchise at the end of the first episode by relaying the story of the man whose job is to clean up elephant excrement at the circus. When someone offers him a job that allows him to stop coming home smelling like excrement every day, his response is simply, what, quit show business?

Patel loads his performance with a depressed defeatism that is, at times, quite difficult to watch. A fan of the original comics that spawned the film franchise, Daniel finds himself exhausted by the constant last minute changes to the script less because they violate the sanctity of the comics so much as because the people making these changes obviously can’t tell the difference between the parts of the comics fans like with the ones that they widely understand to be idiotic.

This is an important backdrop to the ongoing artificial intelligence debate in art production. Producers like Pat like the idea of working with artificial intelligence because artificial intelligence won’t argue with whatever bizarre, inane idea they’ve come up with solely from reading online focus groups, and by online focus groups, I mean random Reddit posts. The problem with this idea is pretty much the same problem we see recurring throughout The Franchise. If your employees are fighting with you about having to do something stupid,  that makes their job more difficult and creates a worse product. Any victory in that context will be a pyrrhic one.

It’s clear from the beginning of The Franchise that Tecto was never going to be a great movie. It’s just too silly. At the same time, Eric (played by Daniel Bruhl), the highbrow director, has some fairly straightforward ideas about what he wants to do that if nothing else will make Tecto nice to look at. He has beautiful storyboards that over time become more and more irrelevant to anything that’s he’s actually shooting, because the studio sometimes gives him bewildering directives about how much lighting to use and at other times restricts the number of extras he can use in a scene for no other reason than to emphasize that he doesn’t have ultimate creative control over the production.

The funny thing about The Franchise, and indeed blockbuster production in general these days, is that in theory the purpose of these studio directives is to control costs, or to keep an egotistical director from creating a film that’s impossible to market. But from all the discussion we see of finances in The Franchise, these arbitrary decisions are just making Tecto that much more expensive. There’s a whole building of imported trees meant to be used as backdrop for a setting that they jettison. At one point, they genocide a whole race of characters for whom they have finished costuming as a means of raising stakes in  another completely different movie in the franchise.

The logical response to Tecto’s out of control costs would be to stop making all these expensive micromanagement decisions in the middle of production and just stick to the script. Instead, Pat comes up with a plan to introduce Chinese product placement, the benefits of which appear to be almost entirely speculative while the negative consequences of further crushing production morale are immediate.

While this all sounds funny and The Franchise tries to bill itself as a comedy, in execution this show is more a horror story than a satire, just an extremely blunt depiction of a toxic work environment that tries to brand itself as feminist by giving women big sticks to hold, with the symbolism of the act an obvious attempt to cover for its genuinely depressing cynicism. The Franchise isn’t a clever show, but something much more profound- it’s a depiction of people who should know better pretending like they don’t, because they’ve convinced themselves there’s only one way to make a movie. And the metaphor is so obviously applicable to so much of American culture at this point that the implications of this are even bleaker than they look.