Amp up the Marvel hubris 12 per cent and you’ve got The Franchise

The Franchise ★★★½
Binge

Is mocking superhero movies a shooting fish in the barrel move at this point, when Marvel is frantically trying to reverse its decline and DC would like to pretend their last few releases don’t exist? Maybe, but for the most part the bullets fired in this movie-set satire find their target. The Franchise is a droll, thorough dissection of comic book commodification, always uneasily perched between the current reality and plausible excess. “Can we internalise our panic?” a producer asks. The answer, thankfully, is not for long.

The Franchise: a sharp-edged depiction of an industry that now has a very bad hangover.Credit: Binge

We arrive on the set of Tecto: Eye of the Storm a month into the shoot. It’s a fictional project, but amp up the Marvel hubris 12 per cent and you’re there. On green screen studio sets German director Eric (Daniel Bruhl) is worried his vision is being undercut, his sweetly idiotic leading man, Adam (Billy Magnussen) is bulking up with sheep steroids, and the producer who has taken over from her fired predecessor, Anita (Aya Cash) is playing power games.

Trying to navigate all this is first assistant director Daniel (Himesh Patel), a quick-thinking problem solver who lies and deceives for the movie’s sake. Issues come at him from all angles, presented in either wide-eyed alarm or withering calm. The show’s British creator, Jon Brown, is a veteran of Succession and Veep (whose creator, Armando Iannucci, is an executive producer and obvious inspiration here), so you get rational discussion of the irrational, stinging offhand insults, and bad outcomes comically spun as good.

With the first episode directed by Sam Mendes (Skyfall, 1917), the show has an absurd authenticity; an episode set on a location shoot in Armenia is preposterous until it’s terrifying. With “God’s rottweiler”, studio executive Pat (Darren Goldstein), kicking heads, the comic excess also makes clear how crass and compliant the making of superhero blockbusters is. Lore is reversed and missed essentials get added to the swelling digital post-production list. Everyone calls Eric a “visionary”, then treats him like a functionary.

The Franchise has a knack for doing the obvious but also the correct thing. You couldn’t do better than cast Richard E. Grant in the part of a stroppy, foul-mouthed British character actor who archly insults everyone, for instance. The show can’t quite thread the needle of Daniel coming to terms with his own ambition even while serving others, but for the most part this is a sharp-edged depiction of an industry that got drunk on billion-dollar successes and now has a very bad hangover. The pettiness is pithy, but the rot is real.

Where’s Wanda? ★★★½
Apple TV+

There’s a tricky balancing act underpinning Apple TV+’s first German original series. A darkly comic thriller about a family’s unconventional search for their missing daughter, the show often has a playful tone and a linear-shifting narrative; it’s trying to keep one step ahead of your expectations. It moves between an awkward anxiousness and heartfelt motivation – the tension spikes in unexpected ways, but so do the farcical interludes.

Heike Makatsch and Axel Stein in Where’s Wanda?, a darkly comic thriller about a family’s unconventional search for a missing daughter.Credit: Apple TV+

The surprise narrator is 17-year-old Wanda Klatt (Lea Drinda), who has gone missing during an annual festival in the sedate German town of Sundersheim. Her parents, Carlotta (Heike Makatsch) and Dedo (Axel Stein), are distraught, but the story skips the fruitless search by local police for day 70, when a clue suggests Wanda is being held nearby. The desperate Klatts decide they have to get access to their neighbour’s homes, but breaking and entering does not go well.

Aided by Wanda’s tech-savvy brother, Ole (Leo Simon), the family instead opt for surveillance, ordering devices by the dozens. But their search for clues turns up all kinds of information, none of which they can directly act on because of the illegal gathering. The show taps into rampant speculation of what happens behind closed doors, while offering clues to Wanda’s locale and a parallel police investigation. Three episodes in and I’m amused, but also invested.

Killer Heat
Amazon Prime

Adapted from a short story by Jo Nesbo, this sun-drenched Mediterranean noir pushes hard-boiled menace and private eye diffidence to a tiring degree, but it lacks for a decent plot and even a hint of intrigue. A bearded Joseph Gordon-Levitt, not at his best, plays a troubled private eye who arrives on a Greek island where a scion has died in a supposed accident – but the wife (Shailene Woodley) of his twin brother (Richard Madden) has her suspicions. It unfolds predictably, as if the prevailing world-weary tone overcame the screenwriters.

Norman Reedus returns in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol.Credit: Emmanuel Guimier/AMC

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol
Stan

The Walking Dead’s European vacation continues with a second spin-off season set in a post-zombie apocalypse France for gruff fan favourite Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus). The transatlantic shift worked the first time, putting Daryl in a different scenario, landscape and headspace, but now adding his long-time friend and comrade, Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride), to the story actually pulls the show back to a familiar dynamic. There’s certainly more action, as various human factions clash, but one of the best additions from season one – Clemence Poesy’s hard-nosed nun Isabelle – is too often sidelined.

Vince McMahon in Mr McMahon.Credit: Netflix

Mr McMahon
Netflix

For more than 40 years Vince McMahon played the twisted modern-day variant of the American showman, performing on screen and off as the entrepreneurial owner of World Wrestling Entertainment, a company he built into a global brand. McMahon co-operated with this six-part documentary from Chris Smith (Tiger King), but had no editorial control, and the result is a chronological recap of his questionable morals, creative instincts, and associated scandals. It’s comprehensive, but not always insightful, eventually reaching the heinous recent allegations that cost McMahon his career and left him under official investigation.

Pixar’s Inside Out 2 is one of the big releases on a slate that has been sadly lacking in them.Credit: AP

Inside Out 2
Disney+

Pixar’s peerless reputation has dipped in recent years, but the Hollywood animation studio makes the most of what could have been a rote sequel to its wonderfully inventive 2015 hit about the emotions at work inside a young girl’s brain. Now aged 13, Riley (Kensington Tallman) has hit puberty, which means that Anxiety (Maya Hawke) is ready to challenge Joy (Amy Poehler) for control of the teen’s outlook. It’s a very PG-friendly coming of age, but director Kelsey Mann has nonetheless made a genuinely heartfelt adventure.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.