‘The Franchise’ Review: Cutting Marvel Down to Size

The new HBO series “The Franchise” satirizes the making of a superhero movie by a fictional movie studio that is Marvel in all but name. (The actual fictional name is Maximum Studios.) Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent, is Marvel’s bitter rival in the superhero field, so you might expect the show to offer an extra measure of savage mockery.

But the eight half-hour episodes (premiering Sunday), while nominally dark and sardonic, do not have anything approaching the visceral pleasure that the genre they are spoofing can often provide. “When you make movies like this, but good, there’s nothing better,” the beleaguered first assistant director, Daniel (Himesh Patel), says in one of the show’s few moments of genuine feeling.

The movie-within-the-show, a second-tier effort called “Tecto,” is clearly not one of the good ones. “The Franchise,” somewhat perversely, operates on the same tepid, clichéd level as the production it is supposed to be mocking.

More could have been expected. The show’s creator, Jon Brown, wrote for “Succession” and, way back, for the barbed British comedy “Misfits.” And the list of executive producers includes the accomplished veterans Sam Mendes and Armando Iannucci. Mendes directed the first episode, and his touch can be seen in an early three-minute shot that follows Daniel as he walks through the cavernous set of “Tecto,” putting out fires (and encountering many of the other central characters). It is a virtuoso moment that nothing else in the show approaches.

Iannucci, of course, is a specialist in the specific sort of satire “The Franchise” undertakes: the acidic depiction of institutional vanity, insecurity and ineptitude. But the vitality of Iannucci creations like “The Thick of It” and “Veep” is exactly what the new show is missing. It has more in common with Iannucci’s most recent show, the scattered outer-space cruise comedy “Avenue 5,” on which Brown worked as a writer and producer. (The sinking-ship metaphor that underlies “The Franchise” was explicit in “Avenue 5.”)

“The Franchise” leapfrogs through the 117-day shoot of “Tecto,” named for its hero, an off-brand Thor (Billy Magnussen) who wields an invisible jackhammer. Each episode finds Daniel and the power-hungry third assistant director, Dag (Lolly Adefope), confronting crises drawn from the musty archives of the Hollywood backstage comedy and then tweaked to fit the world of contemporary big-money filmmaking. Bowing to commercial reality means product-placing Chinese tractors; last-minute rewrites are driven by protests over the studio’s “woman problem”; a temperamental director melts down because Martin Scorsese accuses the studio of killing cinema.