'The Franchise' review: 'Veep' creator Armando Iannucci takes on (and takes down) superhero movies 

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Daniel (Himesh Patel) is second director on a big-screen superhero movie called "Tecto: Eye of the Storm" and trouble is brewing on set. Behind schedule on the 117-day shoot, the film's German-born director Eric Brouchard (Daniel Brühl, most recently "Becoming Karl Lagerfeld") is tormented by both his studio bosses and temperamental leads Adam (Billy Magnussen) and Peter (Richard E. Grant). A top producer (Aya Cash) is called in to straighten things out, which she does not. Daniel gets some back-up in the form of a "third director" (Lolly Adefope, "Shrill") who's not much help either.

This satiric takedown comes from Armando Iannucci ("Veep") and Jon Brown ("Succession").

MY SAY After flaying Washington with "Veep," Iannucci's next TV move was outer space (2020's wan sci-fi comedy "Avenue 5") but the obvious destiny — or at least the obvious bait — was always down here on Earth, in Hollywood. So ludicrous, so target-rich. Where to begin? With the superhero franchise. (Of course. What else?)

He has some support, including Oscar winner Sam Mendes who directs all eight episodes, but this otherwise feels or even reads (if you'd rather) like 90-proof Iannucci. The dialogue zips by at lightsaber speed. Blink and you miss a line, or sneeze, an entire joke. It's a whiz-bang romp of zingers, one-liners, comebacks, come-ons, and every other rhetorical trick you can possibly imagine. Each and all are in service of one largely irrefutable point: Show biz, or at least the corner of it that's increasingly crowded by bloated attention hogs like Marvel, is a joke.

Show biz, and the global franchise of "The Franchise," also knows no borders. Production on "Tecto" appears to take place in a sprawling dead soul of soundstage somewhere in the U.K., where the U.S.-based studio boss, Pat Shannon (Melville native Darren Goldstein) arrives one day to tell Eric that a huge part of his cast (the Fish People) was just wiped out in the studio's tent-pole film that's also in production and occupies the same cinematic universe as "Tecto." Because this is the tent-pole, after all, and will screen/stream before "Tecto," Eric must now lose his poor Fish People too.

It's an amusing plot point, meant to establish how something like the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) is likewise a distended ball of twisted yarn. "The Franchise" doesn't pick on Marvel, but doesn't have too because the "biz" is chock full of tangled IP — "intellectual property" — from "John Wick" to "James Bond" (Mendes directed both "Skyfall" and "Spectre.") The real-world/ real-Hollywood challenge lies before all of them — how to make sense of the increasingly senseless while getting jaded audiences back to the multiplex for each successive, overstuffed pretzel. 

"The Franchise" wouldn't or couldn't make sense of this if it wanted to, but instead succumbs to the lunacy. What's best here are the performances by highly skilled and not-quite-famous actors like Goldstein, Grant, Patel and Cash ("The Boys"), who deliver their lines as if payback to an industry gone mad.

But what's a little less effective — in fact, increasingly obvious in subsequent episodes — is that target. MCU long ago embraced the idiocy, with a wink here or nod there, then went all in with "Deadpool," a growing franchise-within-a-franchise in its own right. If you're already in on the joke (2016's "Deadpool," and the two other "Deadpools" that followed) then how can you be the joke as well? At least give "The Franchise" some credit for trying.

BOTTOM LINE Some (make that a lot of) funny lines, but far too fat a target.