[COLUMN] In the Show's Best Episode, The Franchise Tackles Hollywood's Blockbuster Women Problem | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for “Scene 54: The Lilac Ghost”, the third episode of The Franchise, which aired on HBO last night and is streaming on Max now. It’s worth a watch.

The Franchise is an interesting snapshot of a turbulent moment in Hollywood history.

The half-hour comedy follows the production of Tecto: Eye of the Storm, a superhero blockbuster within a larger shared universe. The eight-episode season hopscotches across the film’s turbulent shooting schedule, focusing on first assistant director Daniel (Himesh Patel) and producer Anita (Aya Cash) who are caught in a tug of war between studio representative Pat (Darren Goldstein), the director Eric (Daniel Brühl) and stars Adam (Billy Magnussen) and Peter (Richard E. Grant).

Much has been made of the show’s accuracy, in how much of the series draws from the realities of producing a motion picture under the current studio system. Indeed, much of the show’s charm comes from the surreality of watching familiar stories about these sorts of productions play out on screen – arguments over product placement, the reaction to statements from Martin Scorsese, “pixel-fucking” VFX artists, even the hijacking of a production from under the nose of the director.

At its best, the series has an anthology quality, selecting stories from troubled productions from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to Joss Whedon’s Justice League to play out on screen. It is much less compelling when it tries to build that episodic structure towards a larger dramatic character-driven pay-off, but there is something fascinating in watching a version of The Producers that feels lifted from the pages of a recent edition of Variety or The Hollywood Reporter.

The Franchise is charming and goofy, which is really all that a half-hour comedy needs to be. Structurally, each of the show’s individual episodes is built around a particular crisis. “Scene 36: The Invisible Jackhammer”, for example, deals with a high-stakes effects sequence in the midst of budget cuts. “Scene 83: Enter the Gurgler” is built around the challenges incorporating an unexpected cameo from a character (Nick Kroll) from the larger film franchise.

However, there are also moments when the show manages to touch on something genuinely compelling about the state of mainstream popular culture. “Scene 54: The Lilac Ghost” is probably the best episode of the show’s first season. It is written by four-time Emmy-winner Rachel Axler, who picked up awards for her work on both The Daily Show and Veep. It’s built around the final days of shooting for Quinn Walker (Katherine Waterson), playing the superhero known as the Lilac Ghost.

Quinn is delighted to be wrapped on Tecto, to get to see her family and to go home. However, Pat approaches Anita and Daniel with what he describes as “the woman problem.” It turns out the studio has received some criticism for its handling of female characters, which Pat insists is completely unfair. He boasts that the studio made a whole movie full of female characters. “We womenned the fuck out of it,” he boasts.

However, this decision to “offshore the women” did little to assuage criticism of the larger brand. “And now they’re saying we’re not real feminists,” protests Bryson (Isaac Powell), the personal assistant to enigmatic studio head “Shane.” The decision is made that Tecto will launder the studio’s reputation. “Shane would like six influential women from the internet to know that he’s not a misogynist,” Pat instructs Anita. “So give me my fucking woman scene.”

Eric, who is in the midst of auditioning “dead wives” to serve as the protagonist’s tragic backstory, is somewhat intrigued at the prospect of turning his crowd-pleasing superhero spectacle into something more earnest and sincere. “I may have done a sexism once in a beer commercial,” Eric confesses with something approaching introspection. “But I always wanted to make a feminism.” This is the logic of mainstream studio filmmaking.

Of course, Tecto was not designed to be a feminist film. The studio didn’t care enough about women to actively consider them as part of the creative process from the beginning. Despite Eric’s seeming (if self-centered) earnestness, the studio is less concerned with actually building a fully-developed female character or exploring a woman’s perspective than it is with cynically insulating itself against entirely justified criticisms of its systemic sexism.

So Daniel and Anita scramble to throw together a subplot for the movie at incredibly short notice that will both prove the studio’s feminist bona fides without radically derailing the movie’s plot or the larger arc of the franchise as a whole. This means bringing back Quinn, and expanding her role within the movie. However, it also means empowering the character without actually giving her narrative agency or allowing her to take up more space. It’s an absurd and paradoxical brief.

With no time and no leeway to actually develop the Lilac Ghost into a compelling character, Daniel and Anita settle on the most superficial form of pop feminism imaginable. They power up the character. They give her “the stick of maximum potency”, a delightfully phallic prop that instantly makes her the most physically powerful character in Tecto: Eye of the Storm, but without actually allowing her to have any meaningful impact on the story being told.

It is a very crass and vulgar sort of feminism, one that assumes that the strength of a female character can be measured in pounds-per-cubic-inch. It’s the logic frequently employed by superhero films, as demonstrated by Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in Captain Marvel or G'iah (Emilia Clarke) in Secret Invasion. It assumes that the operative word in “strong female character” is “strong”, rather than “character.”

The Franchise embraces the inherent absurdity of this. Adam is immediately intimidated when Quinn shows up on set with her new power-up. “It’s not more powerful than my earthquake glove?” Adam demands, worried that he is going to be upstaged in his own movie. This becomes a whole argument that Daniel and Anita have to legislate with Adam’s representatives, who insist that this is unfair because “sticks are cooler than gloves.”

“Scene 54: The Lilac Ghost” reflects the cynicism of all this posturing. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU) made a big deal of the progressiveness of Black Panther or Captain Marvel, treating them as watershed moments in representation on screen that bolstered the studio’s self-image and flattered the egos of its executives. Of course, to do this, it had to erase actual milestones in representation on screen, pretending earlier trailblazers like Blade or Catwoman didn’t exist.

This is all funny and well-observed, an exploration of the shallowness of corporate feminism and how men are often irrationally intimidated by any space given to women in these stories. However, “Scene 54: The Lilac Ghost” works as well as it does because it repeatedly focuses on the very human dimension of this absurdity: Quinn Walker. Waterson is wonderful in her guest appearance, as a woman who finds herself used as a prop by the eponymous franchise to prove its feminism.

Nobody ever asks Quinn what she wants or what she is comfortable with. The episode returns multiple times to a scene that is both funny and sad, as Quinn leans back in her chair so that her tears run down her temples rather than her cheeks to avoid spoiling her make-up. Nobody working on the film bothers to ask why the subject of this exercise has to cry so frequently that she’s figured out how to do it without slowing production. The truth is that they already know.

This is the reality of what it is to be a woman in a major franchise like this, to be used to establish the larger brand’s progressive credentials and then to be thrown to the wolves as the rabid fanbase that these studios have cultivated tears them to pieces. How many stars of these movies have had to wipe their social media accounts in response to fan backlash? Too many come to mind: Daisy Ridley, Kelly Marie Tran, Constance Wu, Ruby Rose, Leslie Jones.

Quinn seems most heavily modelled on Brie Larson, the star of the Captain Marvel franchise who has been the target of a sustained campaign of sexist hatred and abuse. Larson was the star of the first female-led movie in the MCU. Larson was clearly intended to be one of the franchise’s guiding lights following the departure of Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr., but reports suggest that she has (understandably) become “disillusioned” with the franchise.

Each episode of The Franchise ends with what is effectively a gag reel, a collection of supplemental and promotional material tied to the release of Tecto. In most cases, this takes the form of softball interviews. The final bleak gag of “Scene 54: The Lilac Ghost” is Quinn doing press for Tecto, trying to avoid triggering any online outrage from misogynist superfans. After all, this is the reality of being a woman working on a major franchise, the fear any quote can be taken out of context in bad faith.

“So tell us about your experience of working on this movie,” the interviewer (Gemma Acosta) prompts. “It’s definitely been an experience, working on this movie,” she answers. Pressed to elaborate, she bluntly explains, “I was hired as an actress, and I did what I was asked to do to the best of my abilities.” It’s a very deliberate and very conscious content-less answer, a simple statement of fact with no color or personality.

“The fans haven’t exactly embraced me,” Quinn confesses to Anita. The producer waves it off. “The militant wing of our base is vanishingly small,” she assures the star. Bryson offers some reassuring statistics: “Ten-, twenty-, thirty-thousand people.” Of course, those people are paying customers, so the studio isn’t actually willing to do anything to combat them any more than real-life studios like Disney are. All they can do is reassure Quinn that the dogs sniffing her car are “pedigree bomb sniffers” and urge her to change pediatricians.

Most of The Franchise is fairly light. It's a very broad comedy about the inherent absurdity of these sorts of productions. “Scene 54: The Lilac Ghost” is the best episode of the first season because it manages to do that while honing in on an actual human consequence of this ridiculous circus, a very personal cost to this brand-building nonsense. It’s the show at its maximum potency.