TV talk: ‘The Franchise’ spoofs superhero films

One Day in October – Yes Drama, Yes VOD and Sting+

While the anniversary of the outbreak of the war has come and gone, there is a great deal of television programming still devoted to illuminating the many stories of those who were killed and those who survived. One Day in October, the first dramatized version of the events, is showing on Yes Drama and Yes VOD and Sting+. 

It features some of Israel’s biggest stars, among them Naomi Levov, Yuval Semo, and Swell Ariel Or in episodes about an ambulance crew in the South, two girls trapped at the Supernova festival, a Jewish cyclist whose life is saved by a group of Bedouin, and a wife coping with the loss of her son and husband.

The Day That Never Ends - Kan 11

Kan 11 is running The Day That Never Ends, a new documentary series on the events of October 7 and their aftermath, which is also available on the Kan website at Kan.org.il. More than 100 people who survived October 7 in kibbutzim, army bases, the Supernova festival, villages, and cities tell gripping stories of tragedy, heroism, and resilience.

Nobody Wants This – Netflix

By now you know if you are into Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, and I’m aware that everyone on the planet seems to be enjoying it – except me. I suffered through the cliched series, which seems to fill a niche in every generation for people who want a comic treatment of the issue of intermarriage. 

Abie’s Irish Rose was a hugely popular Broadway play about an Irish Catholic girl who falls in love with a Jewish guy that came out in 1922 and was filmed twice. Then there was Bridget Loves Bernie, a TV sitcom in the 1970s, and later Keeping the Faith, with Ben Stiller as a rabbi in love with a non-Jewish woman. In the series Weeds, the non-Jewish heroine’s first husband was Jewish and her fourth husband was actually a rabbi. There are even more examples.

I imagine people want to see this story in every generation – because this issue comes up in every generation. While I think Adam Brody truly deserves the title of “hot rabbi” that he has been given online, and that he is a fitting counterpart to the Hot Priest character on the series Fleabag, none of the characters in the show felt real to me. 

I’ll leave it to others to enumerate the inaccuracies of the rabbinical observance of Brody’s character, but I’ll sum it up by saying that I didn’t look forward to finding out what would happen in the next episode. I am aware that I’ll have to agree to disagree with the rest of the English-speaking world on this one.

The Franchise – Yes, Hot, and Next TV

Most of us have seen super-hero movies and of course they have millions (or is it billions?) of fans around the world, but even those who find them to be mind-numbingly uninvolving corporate profit-generating devices will enjoy the new, comic series The Franchise, which has been available on Yes VOD , Sting+, and Cellcom TV, begins airing on Hot HBO on October 10 at 9:30 p.m. and will also be available on Hot VOD and Next TV.

It’s a behind-the-scenes story of the making of one super-hero movie epic, called Tecto: Eye of the Storm, and first assistant director Daniel – the man in charge of the nerve-wracking dirty work of bringing this billion-dollar beast to life – played by Himesh Patel, who starred in Yesterday as the only man in the world who remembers The Beatles (worth seeing if you can find it). 

He has to take care of such mundane tasks as calming an actor dressed as what is referred to on-set as a “fish person” – who is having a panic attack because he is sure that the latex costume is poisoning him – and an actor so stoned he must be kept away from studio executives.

Daniel also has to manage up, coddling the artistic German director, Eric (Daniel Bruhl), who has been brought in to give the project artistic credibility. Eric comes with a loyal assistant who bubbles over the brilliance of his every idea, and keeps reminding him, “That’s why you won the Golden Leopard at Locarno.” 

Daniel is good at his job – so good in fact that he finds a way to make Eric think it’s really his idea to add another sun to the movie’s skyline so that the executives on the set won’t think it’s too dark. He also has to help Eric accommodate the sudden loss of the fish people from the script, after another installment of the franchise shooting simultaneously decides to finish them off.

If you enjoy behind-the-scenes comedy/dramas, you’re going to get hooked on The Franchise. In its funniest moments, it’s reminiscent of many scenes on Call My Agent! where the agents have to support their clients emotionally, as well as the series UnREAL, about the making of a reality TV show. 

There have also been many movies about the business of filmmaking – David Mamet’s State and Maine, Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night and Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain come to mind.

But the twist here is that The Franchise is about a very particular kind of big-budget formulaic movie-making, which is so rigid in some ways and so sloppy in others (the fish people being suddenly eliminated from a script in the middle of shooting is a prime example) and we haven’t seen it poked fun of up close quite like this. The closest I can think of were the Aqua Man scenes on the series Entourage. The Franchise is just as funny, and far more biting.

Monsters: 

The Lyle and Erik Menendez – Netflix

Throughout this difficult year, I have tried my best to walk a fine line between focusing on meaningful documentaries about the war, serious films that might suit people in a reflective mood, and escapist fare meant to take your mind off of everything that is really going on. 

As the first anniversary of the war passes, I find that I have less tolerance for middle-of-the-road true-crime dramas. All around the world, people are fascinated by Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez, the Netflix series about the brothers convicted of murdering their parents, which tells the story from the brothers’ point of view. It’s very well acted, and was created by Ryan Murphy, who made such series as Glee and American Crime Story. The first season of his Monsters series featured Jeffrey Dahmer. 

While the Menendez brothers’ story is undeniably interesting, I found the characters were all people I didn’t want to spend time with, whether or not there was a miscarriage of justice. Maybe I will enjoy true crime again the way I used to someday, but I can’t enjoy it much now.

500 Days of Summer – Disney+, Apple TV+

The pitfall in recommending light entertainment is that for some, it will be too superficial to capture their interest. But 500 Days of Summer, which is available on Disney+ and Apple TV+, is an involving and charming story about a romance that could be categorized as a dark rom-com but really goes deeper than that description suggests. 

So many movies and television shows dramatize the quest for a soul mate from the female point of view, but fewer focus on a male character who truly wants to fall in love, so this movie fills a gap in what’s out there. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, an architect who has somehow ended up writing greeting cards and who yearns for a serious girlfriend. When Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is hired at his office, he is instantly infatuated with her. But she doesn’t want to be tied down, and he tries to convince her about the value of romance. 

The story is told in flashbacks and flash forwards, with all kinds of funny touches, like a sequence when Tom imagines half of Los Angeles comes out to congratulate him after a very good date. Religion is not an issue here, but Gordon-Levitt is Jewish and Deschanel is not, so maybe some Nobody Wants This fans will enjoy it after they finish binging this series.