Something to watch tonight: Sunday 12 January

The Franchise (Brown, 2024)

Apologies for this update arriv­ing so late but Friday was the first time in weeks that we saw a second con­sec­ut­ive day of sun­shine in Wellington and I may have lost my mind a little.

The Franchise was recom­men­ded to us by one of our sum­mer house­guests and, sure enough, we blitzed through all eight half-hour epis­odes in a just a few days.

It’s a com­edy about a hap­less film crew shoot­ing a minor entry in a major super­hero shared uni­verse in a non­des­cript stu­dio just out­side of London while the big­ger and bet­ter resourced main pic­ture is in the facil­ity next door. Their efforts at get­ting through each day are thwarted by a com­bin­a­tion of head office inter­fer­ence, dir­ect­or intransigence, act­or sab­ot­age or some com­bin­a­tion of the three.

The First Assistant Director, Daniel Kumar (dead­pan Himesh Patel from Station Eleven) is try­ing to keep the train on the tracks but is not helped by the para­chut­ing in of his ex-girlfriend Anita (Aya Cash from The Boys) as line pro­du­cer or the new Third Assistant Director, “Dag” Nwaeze (Lolly Adefope) who may or may not be a fig­ment of everyone’s imagination.

The film’s super­hero Tecto (Billy Magnussen), is played by a ter­min­ally insec­ure piece of beef­cake who is addicted to the phys­ic­al enhance­ment prop­er­ties of vari­ous dif­fer­ent chem­ic­al com­pounds and the superhero’s main super­power appears to be wield­ing an “invis­ible jack­ham­mer” – a green pogo stick. His supervil­lain is played by a tired old has-been (Richard E. Grant) who counts the minutes until each day is wrapped and spends his spare time remotely attend­ing sexu­ally to his young wife with the aid of an app on his phone.

Jon Brown (a writer on Succession and Avenue 5) cre­ated the series but among the list of exec­ut­ive pro­du­cers is Armando Ianucci (The Thick of It, Veep, The Death of Stalin) and Oscar-winner Sam Mendes who dir­ec­ted the first epis­ode. Also in the writers’ room is Guardian colum­nist Marina Hyde, one of the fun­ni­est people around.

Many of the incid­ents that befall the pro­duc­tion appear to have been lightly dis­guised from real life and the show was pain­fully close for com­fort for the view­ers at our house who have had exper­i­ence work­ing on sim­il­ar productions.

Last week HBO announced that they wouldn’t be renew­ing The Franchise for a second sea­son which, on one level, is a shame because Patel and Cash are a couple I wanted to see more of but the film pro­duc­tion satire was really a one-joke deal and those eight epis­odes covered it nicely from all angles.

If you like com­ed­ies about film­mak­ing, you would prob­ably also enjoy Irma Vep which I recom­men­ded here back in October.

Where to watch The Franchise

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on Binge

Canada: Digital pur­chase from Apple

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Sky

India: Streaming on JioCinema

USA: Streaming on Max

UK: