There will be no season two for HBO’s superhero film backstage satire The Franchise. The comedy series debuted last October and ran for eight episodes.
The Franchise centered on the first assistant director (Hamish Patel) on a superhero film that is part of an overall cinematic universe. Every production day sees him juggling the egos of the lead actors, an auteur director somewhat out of his depth on such a big production, a former girlfriend-now-producer on the film and the ever changing whims of the chief executives of the studio all the while trying to insure that the film’s production stays on schedule.
The series also starred Aya Cash, Richard E. Grant, Daniel Brühl, Jessica Hynes, Billy Magnussen, Lolly Adefope, Darren Goldstein and Isaac Powell.
The show was created by Veep and Succession veteran Jon Brown with director Sam Mendes and Veep creator Armando Iannucci serving as executive producers.
While I personally enjoyed the show, the cancellation doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The show tried to be accessible to the average television viewer, but more often than not was incredibly “inside baseball.” Many of the plotlines and jokes were drawn from actual backstage drama at various real film franchises. Other jokes stem from how film production in general can sometimes work. If one did not follow along the behind-the-scenes reporting in both the industry trades and the more reputable genre press, I dare say that portions of the show could be fairly opaque. And middling ratings while still sporting largely positive reviews – 74% on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes – would bear that out.
