Summary
The Franchise might pluck some low-hanging fruit in Episode 3, but its comedic hit rate remains extremely high, so it’s difficult to complain.
Nobody said The Franchise is a documentary, but Episode 3, “Scene 54: The Lilac Ghost”, has an ear to the ground of the biggest problem afflicting tentpole franchise moviemaking these days. Maximum Studios has, in its own words, “a woman problem.”
The woman problem comes from the decision to cancel The Sisters Squad, which we heard about in Episode 2. With that project canned, there has to be some faux-feminism somewhere, and it falls to Anita to crowbar some into Tecto – at the expense of literally everyone.
Nobody, least of all me, is arguing that this is a fresh subject for satire. It seems like low-hanging fruit if anything, and there’s an underlying feeling in “Scene 54: The Lilac Ghost” that The Franchise knows this as well as anyone else. But most of the episode is gold nonetheless, however heavy-handed it might be.
It isn’t just the lack of diversity on-screen, or the forced efforts to create that diversity through tokenistic means, but also the inevitable backlash that follows, with Redditors getting a glimpse of something trivial, like the length of a stick of maximum potency, and whipping themselves up into a neckbeard frenzy.
It’s up to the Tecto crew, though particularly Dan and Anita, to try and smooth all this over, whether that’s reassuring Adam about the potential side effects of his steroids or bringing in dogs to sweep an actress’s car for bombs following the photo leaks. That kind of thing is quietly genius because it stretches an absurd premise – being angry about a woman’s comic-book stick and venting about it online – to its terrifyingly real conclusion, which is threats against the life of someone reluctantly doing their job.
Katherine Waterston is the guest star in The Franchise Episode 3, playing Quinn Walker, a serious actor who has been consistently roped into comic-book nonsense to the extent that even her kid’s pediatrician is slagging her off online. When she cries in her trailer, she does so lying down so that the tears don’t smudge her ridiculous makeup.
Katherine Waterston in The Franchise | Image via HBO
And it isn’t just the makeup that’s ridiculous. Anita’s idea when pressed about the woman problem from on high is to insert Quinn into a nothing scene with Adam wherein she wields a “stick of maximum potency” which is just as powerful as Tecto’s earthquake glove and invisible jackhammer, thanks very much.
Nobody but Dan cares that this is outside of the established canon and that people will complain about it. He might be the only one concerned that the complaints might become genuine threats to Quinn’s life, though he doesn’t vocalize that bit. It’s largely just another thing for him to clash with Anita over since he’s still not over their past relationship and “the yawn incident”, which he later explains to Dag was when she made a joke at his expense after he yawned during an early meeting, leading to a string of very funny nicknames – Dan-bien, The Yawn Identity, etc. – and him not having sat down on set ever since.
Everyone else sees the scene differently. Eric sees it as his chance to “make a feminism” after he might have inadvertently “done a sexism” during a beer commercial; Quinn is contractually roped into reshoots after being thrilled to be free of the set; Adam is further emasculated; and Peter can’t bring himself to cower on cue.
The joke, once again, is that the biggest obstacle to making good tentpole comic book movies is executives and actors, and the only reason they get made at all is because of people like Dan who just want a job and some credit, and people like Anita who are smart enough to use the projects as a stepping stone to something actually creatively and professionally fulfilling. If nothing else, The Franchise Episode 3 delivers the most progress in Dan and Anita’s dynamic; their team-up is one of the only moments of serious human drama in a sea of blunt satire and over-the-top absurdism.
I have no idea to what extent The Franchise will pursue this, or whether it’ll just be content to continue riffing on the various blights of big-budget moviemaking. I’m fine either way. While I get that some might see “Scene 54: The Lilac Ghost” as a bit too obviously, maybe even old hat, I continue to find the show’s comedic hit rate well worth the price of admission. Whether that could ever be said about Tecto, though, is another question entirely.
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