It is a strange truth that to satirise something effectively, you have to love it – at least a little. You have to see it in the round and understand not just where it fails but where it succeeds, and why some people like it while others loathe it. Good satire doesn’t come from indifference: it comes from disappointment, rage and the desire to show not just how things fail but how they could be better.
Jonathan Swift wrote about people eating babies because he was furious. Jane Austen looked at Georgian women’s lot and laid bare all its miseries through laughter. Leaping over a few centuries, the likes of Yes, Minister, Yes, Prime Minister and Spitting Image skewered politicians, civil servants and cultural figures because they thought life could be less of a nightmare. The Thick of It, Veep and Succession carry on that grand tradition.
The Franchise, by contrast – and despite its creative team being largely drawn from those behind that last holy trinity – feels put together by much more tired people driven by less noble aims. It follows the shooting of a second-or-third-tier superhero movie by Maximum Studios (Marvel in all but name) and all the chaos that involves. And it does, over its eight-episodes, cover all the chaos there can be in making a genre movie.
There is the auteur director, Eric (Daniel Brühl), brought in for gravitas, whose neuroses about indoor scarves and penchant for last-minute script changes ceaselessly throw spanners in the works, aided by his devoted wingwoman, Steph (Jessica Hynes). There is the beleaguered first assistant director, Dan (Himesh Patel, doing much to humanise the series, which is otherwise full of ciphers rather than characters). He is doing the directing along with everything else, including trying to keep the story canonical while staying on the right side of the new producer, Anita (Aya Cash), who happens to be his ex-girlfriend. There is the executive Pat (Darren Goldstein), demanding rewrites when, for example, the studio decides it has “a woman problem” and needs to beef up the female part. This is done by giving her a Stick of Maximum Potency. Pat approves: “Good words.”
There is also the famed theatre actor Peter (Richard E Grant, having a whale of a time), in it for the money and the opportunities it gives him to mess with the insecure lead beefcake, Adam (Billy Magnussen). Plus, there are night shoots, complicated stunts with one chance to succeed, product placement requirements, studio politics, cameos from bigger stars to negotiate and vital crew members gradually falling apart.
After the pilot, during which I not only didn’t laugh but couldn’t see anywhere I was supposed to laugh (except when Dan tells the classic, perfect joke about the manure-shoveller at the circus), there are some good – if never great – lines and images scattered around. The scene about a faecal transplant that is simply a long walk to the line “Will you do me a solid?” deserves recognition. As does almost everything uttered by Lolly Adefope (as the insouciant, charmingly devastating third assistant director, Dag), who can put a ridiculously effective comic spin on anything and is much needed here.
But it is mainly a wearying litany of difficulties and failures. Apart from the circus joke and Dan’s occasional pleas to stay true to the source material, there is no sense of love for the art or the craft they are all involved in. The makers of The Franchise seem to hold the endeavour in as much contempt as Peter, Anita or Dag do (“Have you ever thought: ‘I’m killing cinema’? What if this isn’t a dream factory? What if it’s an abattoir?”).
It becomes more and more repetitive and dispiriting, especially as there is so little development in the relationships between the characters. They remain simply cogs in the mighty studio machine. Nothing much is made of Dan and Anita’s history. Steph falls in “stress love” with one of the lesser actors, but that goes nowhere emotionally. There is no downtime to relax or enjoy a moment of Dan’s success in putting out one (or 100) fires. The overall experience is, ironically, rather like that of watching a second- or third-tier superhero movie. Relentless noise and fury signifying, in the end, not quite enough.
• The Franchise is on Sky Comedy and Now in the UK and Foxtel and Binge in Australia
