'Franchise' fatigue

HBO takes aim at superhero movie making, plus a tribute to John Amos, a 'Simpsons' finale that wasn't, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as Moe is now played by Topher Grace…

Is The Franchise a Player?

I know that fewer and fewer people watch linear television, that the only things people tend to watch live are sports and other big events, and that timeslots are thus entirely pointless. Yet I can’t stop being amused — and/or confused — that for the next several Sunday nights, each new episode of The Penguin, a spin-off of a popular film about one of the most famous superheroes of all time, will be followed by a new episode of The Franchise, a new comedy from Armando Iannucci and company dedicated to relentlessly mocking the very concept of superhero movies, as well as anybody stupid, cynical, or desperate enough to be involved in making them. Left hand, meet right hand. Say hello.

Hollywood has a long but uneven track record of satirizing itself. For every masterpiece like The Player, there are a dozen or more self-indulgent misfires that assume that the audience simply needs to recognize the target of a joke in order to laugh. The Franchise unfortunately leans towards the latter camp. Created by Jon Brown — an alum of Veep and Succession, but also of Iannucci’s forgettable Avenue 5 — with a premiere directed by Sam Mendes, it frequently seems too nakedly contemptuous of its subject matter to have bothered crafting interesting humor about it. Almost everything is superficial, as tired in its own way as a lot of recent Marvel and DC projects have been. It’s a terrific cast, and every now and then I’d laugh hard at a punchline — usually something creatively profane — but not nearly as often as I should have, given the talent involved in front of and behind the camera.

Odds and/or ends

• As I’ve said a lot lately, I really do not enjoy writing tributes, because it means that someone whose work I long admired has died. This week, we found out that John Amos — who played a pair of iconic Seventies roles on Good Times and in Roots, and damn near stole Coming to America out from under Eddie Murphy — had passed away earlier this year. So I wrote about him.

• One thought that ultimately felt too off-topic for the Amos story: when he was first introduced as Florida’s husband on Maude, his character was named Henry Evans, not James. And while Good Times once or twice mentioned that Florida had previously worked as a maid, you never got the sense that the family had once lived somewhere in New York and only recently moved to the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago. Every now and then, you’ll get a spinoff like that, where someone is technically playing the same character from another show, but that otherwise doesn’t care about the original details.

• Last week, I linked to my interview with Nobody Wants This stars Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. The full season has been out long enough that people out in the world are starting to engage with the same questions that Dan Fienberg asked in his review: is this show Good For The Jews? (For what it’s worth, I share Dan’s opinion that by far the most implausible part of the show is that Bell’s well-to-do Angeleno character would be this ignorant of all things Jewish.) Whether you’re currently celebrating Rosh Hashanah or not, I’m curious what those of you who’ve watched it thought.

• A question prompted by our family’s Doctor Who binge (currently in the first Matt Smith season): what would be the American equivalent of when Richard Curtis guest-wrote an episode where the Doctor met Vincent Van Gogh? Nora Ephron writing a very special Star Trek where the crew meets Marilyn Monroe?

Is this the end of The Simpsons? Of course not.

Finally, let’s talk about the series finale of The Simpsons — or, rather, the 36th season premiere of The Simpsons, “Bart’s Birthday,” which was structured as a star-studded special, hosted by an animated version of former Simpsons writer Conan O’Brien, honoring the end of the greatest TV comedy of all time. This was, of course, a fake-out, since there’s a whole season to get through. And even if the series’ long-term future on the decaying carcass of the Fox network is tenuous, it will almost certainly keep cranking out new episodes for years to come, even if it’s directly for Disney+.

I tend to push back whenever people argue that the series’ legacy is somehow stained by its later decades. No, the show isn’t nearly as consistent as it was in the glory years. Few modern episodes are remotely as packed with brilliant gags as the ones from O’Brien’s era. And there have been some stretches — particularly in the early-mid teens — that were downright bad most of the time, leaning into the show’s most mean-spirited traits. But the Jerkass Homer period eventually ended, and The Simpsons has dealt with its advancing age — and the sheer number of stories and jokes that it’s already told five times over — by becoming more formally inventive. Latter-day episodes like “Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind,” “Barthood,” or “The Dad Feeling’s Limited” don’t turn me into Homer watching Hans Moleman getting hit in the groin with a football, but they’re clever and creative enough to make me more than happy that the show still exists to allow them to happen.

“Bart’s Birthday” felt very much in that vein. Jessica Conrad’s script makes the smart choice of framing the faux finale as something written by an A.I., HackGPT. So the episode becomes as much a parody of the utter uselessness of creativity by algorithm as it is making fun of the various clichés of TV series-enders.

That said, I’d have appreciated a cap tip to any of the previous times the writers actually attempted to craft an episode that would serve as a series finale in case of emergency. Most notably, there’s Season 23’s lovely “Holidays of Future Passed,” a flashforward set at Christmas as a bookend to the first full episode, which also took place at that time of year. Even so, it was fun to see iconic scenes — like Homer jumping the gorge, or “stupid sexy Flanders!” — repurposed to see how even they could have been used to conclude the show.

Before Season Four of The Wire debuted, I wound up at a dinner with the four young actors who played the junior high friends at the center of that year’s story. We got to talking about TV, and at one point, I mentioned that I was around their age when The Simpsons debuted. Maestro Harrell, who played Randy, looked at me with shock and said, “Wait, The Simpsons hasn’t always been on?” And that was back when we are about to get the 18th season of the show. It’s twice as old now! And I’m glad it’s still around for episodes like this one.

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?