As the man behind some of the greatest comedies of all time (The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge, The Thick of It), it’s safe to say Armando Iannucci knows his way around a TV set. But even he was left bewildered by his latest project. The Franchise – which chronicles the chaotic production of a mid-tier superhero movie – is so ridiculously meta and so meticulously realistic that accidentally straying into the action became an occupational hazard. “I would sit down in front of the monitor and someone would say: ‘Sorry, you’re in shot.’ Why would you put the monitor in front of the … Oh! This is Tecto: Eye of the Storm’s monitor! This isn’t The Franchise monitor!” The only reliable way to distinguish the pretend crew from the genuine crew was the colour of their lanyards (yellow for the real TV show; black for the fake movie).
It’s a show with a wealth of acting talent involved. As viewers, we mainly shadow Daniel, the first assistant director who is “obsessed and exhausted,” says Himesh Patel (Yesterday) who plays him. He’s joined by new third assistant director Dag, AKA Lolly Adefope (Ghosts), who describes her as “messy and annoying”. The pair must wrangle the actors (including Richard E Grant’s obnoxious luvvie Peter, whose primary passion is his lucrative work for the Libyan tourist board) as well as auteurish director Eric (Marvel alumnus Daniel Brühl) – who has his own doggedly devoted assistant, the cheery and only slightly sexually frustrated Steph (W1A’s Jessica Hynes).
Joining Iannucci behind the (real) scenes was another dream team. The Franchise’s roots date back to the early 1990s, when Sam Mendes – then the golden boy of London theatre – asked Iannucci, who had recently co-created seminal radio comedy On the Hour, if he wanted to work together. The collaboration never materialised but they stayed in touch. On a lunch date almost a decade ago, Mendes began talking about the weirdness of working on a commercial franchise – in his case, the James Bond films – as (in Iannucci’s words) an “Oscar-winning Shakespearean director”. Iannucci off-handedly replied that there was “a funny show right there”. Mendes thought he was on to something.
At that point, Marvel was in its imperial phase, so comic-book movies seemed like the perfect setting for their fictional franchise. They pitched the idea to HBO, who began developing it in the US, but slow progress meant that during the pandemic the pair asked to repatriate the project – after all, many superhero movies are actually filmed in the UK (partly because of generous tax breaks). That the intervening years had seen a glut of comic-book content lead to superhero fatigue meant the industry seemed even more ripe for parody. Mendes and Iannucci recruited Succession’s Jon Brown as showrunner – who assembled a writers’ room that included Guardian columnist Marina Hyde and Avenue 5’s Keith Akushie – and set about creating their own fake comic-book universe.
The first hurdle was coming up with an amusingly silly yet wholly feasible superhero – a tricky task for two reasons. Comic-book characters are already “so overblown”, says Brown, that “it’s a bit like what people say about Trump; how do you satirise something that’s already so ludicrous?” It was also nigh-on impossible to find a character who didn’t already exist: the team sat surrounded by superhero encyclopedias, and “nine times out of 10” their ideas had already been done by Marvel or DC.
Eventually, they found a gap in the market: Tecto (played by desperately insecure actor Adam, who is in turn played by Aladdin’s Billy Magnussen) was a construction worker who fell through a fissure in the Earth; now he’s a superhero with the power to cause earthquakes with his invisible jackhammer. Brown was fascinated by the bizarre Marvel-to-Hollywood pipeline in which “80-year-old pieces of IP designed for five-year-old children” are repurposed into “incredibly heavy, very dark films”. In tribute, Eric becomes fixated on giving his movie – which follows Tecto’s cosmic quest to stop the Earth splitting apart – a “crappy eco fracking subtext”, says Brown. (Other weighty themes include China, freedom of speech and “women,” according to Iannucci.)
Having watched the first three episodes, I presume Tecto is going to be a spectacular flop: the opening scene, a disorientingly stressful single take by Mendes (who deployed the technique to great acclaim in his first world war epic 1917), sees Daniel deal with endless fiascos; we later witness dodgy stunts and radical last-minute plot changes, a knock-on effect of other developments in the wider cinematic universe (representatives of the Marvel-esque Maximum Studios are invariably on hand to deliver brutal news). Yet the central film is apparently not a lost cause. “What remains to be seen is how the movie is actually going to turn out,” says Patel. “We get to see Deadpool & Wolverine and it makes a billion worldwide and as far as we’re aware they had a great time making it – but it could have been chaos.” Iannucci thinks Tecto “actually looks quite good” by the end, but is keen to point out that it’s not supposed to be a zeitgeist-defining tentpole feature. “I’d say it’s the Ant-Man of the output; they’re clearly not spending hundreds of millions of dollars.”
I had assumed The Franchise team would be cynical about the superhero industrial complex; at one point, Dag asks Daniel if he worries that comic-book movies are killing cinema (“What if this isn’t a dream factory. What if it’s an abattoir?!”). In truth, they are huge fans: Brown and Patel are both lovers of the Marvel films (“Daniel says that when you make movies like this, but good, there’s nothing better. I completely agree,” says Patel), while Iannucci is a lifelong comic-book devotee – he’s even written Spider-Man and Daredevil stories for Marvel (only Adefope admits to having “never been a huge Marvel girlie”). Seeing as The Franchise is so fuelled by fans, does Iannucci even consider it satire? “Well, I never think of things as satire,” he says. “I mean, I can see why I’m called a satirist, but I never wake up going: what should I satirise today? I’m just someone who makes things, most of which I hope are funny, about topics that interest me.”
At the very least, The Franchise reflects the absurdities of making such films. Early on, Dag is warned not to let a visiting executive see the 60 live yoshino cherry trees the team imported from Japan at huge expense then cut from the script. To ensure this preposterousness was believable, Brown knew he had to make the show as accurate as possible. He spoke extensively to actors, directors and crew members who had worked on similar films, drawing inspiration from both lighthearted anecdotes – such as the time a crew anxiously awaited a set visit from their superstar producer, only to be greeted with his face on an iPad – and more serious ones: one subplot involves Adam in turmoil over the human growth hormone he feels pressured to inject to achieve an action man physique. Other storylines – such as when a new piece of lighting equipment burns the eyes of the film stars – were plucked wholesale from reality.
Despite the broad, almost farcical tone of The Franchise, it is often reminiscent of the most high-profile entry on Brown’s CV, the notoriously well-researched Succession (“My favourite things that I’ve worked on have involved getting the detail right,” he says). Both The Franchise and Succession are essentially workplace comedies which hurl the viewer headlong into a corporate disaster zone where they must scramble to gloss lingo and unpack hierarchy. Succession “emboldened” Brown when it came to fast-moving narrative, he says. Adefope, who “always appreciated not being patronised to” when watching Succession, noticed a similar tone on The Franchise (“There’s nothing worse than when something is completely over-explained”). You may also hear the ghost of Succession in The Franchise’s profane dialogue: for Daniel, the precarious production is “a scrotum resting on a razor’s edge”. Yet this kind of grossly evocative language has a heritage that can be traced back further, all the way to Iannucci’s The Thick of It (which Brown also wrote for).
What The Thick Of It and Succession don’t have, however, is a deliciously ironic layer of self-referentialism: when we see Patel and Adefope wearily wrangling Adam and co, we know that in reality someone else is doing the same to them. Having been a runner in her early 20s, Adefope already knew what it felt like to work behind the scenes, but playing Dag cemented the thanklessness of her character’s job. “Nobody even really congratulates you. If an actor does a monologue, everyone will be like: ‘Wow, they learned all their lines!’ If an AD puts out 100 fires, it’s like: ‘Great! Now there’s going to be 105 tomorrow. Get used to it.’”
Making The Franchise was meta on every level, underlined by the fact that filming took place in Watford’s Leavesden studios, sandwiched between the set of Games of Thrones prequel House of The Dragon and the Harry Potter studio tour, as Patel notes wryly. Ultimately, The Franchise is relaxed about the ubiquity of spin-off culture – in fact, Iannucci is considering applying the same model to the show itself. “I have actually suggested that we do a Franchise universe: a series of 60-minute dramas featuring Dag; [a show about] Daniel’s home life … ” He’s joking, I think – but in a world of endless sequels and intensely mined archive material, who knows what could happen if this particular piece of IP turns into a runaway hit.
The Franchise is on Sky Comedy and Now on 21 October. It is available on Foxtel and Binge in Australia, and HBO and Max in the US now.
