The Franchise: HBO’s Marvel spoof is one fans and haters can agree on.

Midway through the first episode of The Franchise, the new HBO series about the making of a comic-book blockbuster, the movie's director finds out that an entire civilization no longer exists. Eric (Daniel Brühl), an intense German auteur who's just made the leap from festival darling to the studio lot, is seven weeks into shooting Tecto: Eye of the Storm when he gets a visit from Pat (Darren Goldstein), a bearlike executive from Maximum Studios. Pat, this corner of the multiverse's equivalent of Marvel's Kevin Feige, is also overseeing the simultaneous production of Centurios 2, the studio tentpole that brings together its biggest and most bankable superheroes, and they've run into a little trouble with its third act, a "run of dry plot pellets" that isn't going down as smoothly as it needs to. What the movie needs, the studio has concluded, is an alien genocide, one that feels brutal and devastating but also, Pat proudly notes, "badass." The species that has been wiped out in the name of raising the stakes also figures heavily in Eric's movie, which is meant to be released immediately after Centurios 2. But the bigger movie comes first, so Eric and Co. will just have to figure out how to make do without. That's a wrap on the fish people.

If there's a common trait that unites The Franchise's characters, it's denial, the only thing that allows them to keep their sanity and self-respect in a system indifferent to one and actively hostile to the other. Eric is convinced he's an eccentric artist, not the kind of "hipster chinos guy who goes to Muji to buy a towel." His lead actor, Adam (Billy Magnussen), believes that this is the role that will finally make him a star, rather than cement him as a B-list himbo. And Eric's first assistant director, Daniel (Himesh Patel), clings to the idea that he might finally get to direct a movie of his own, despite having a more clear-eyed view than anyone of what a miserable fate that would be.

Although the idea for The Franchise sprang from a meeting between two-time James Bond director Sam Mendes (who helms the first episode) and Veep 's Armando Iannucci (who executive produces), the series' creator, Jon Brown, is a veteran TV writer who has had little truck with the superhero-industrial complex (his previous credits include Veep, Succession , and Avenue 5 ), and the show sought out actors whose filmographies are mostly free of colons and numerals. (The exceptions are Brühl, the Marvel Cinematic Universe's own Baron Zemo, and Richard E. Grant, who had small roles in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Loki .) The first season's eight episodes feel neither defensive nor score-settling, the rare satire that can be enjoyed by fans and haters alike.

The lack of firsthand knowledge doesn't make The Franchise feel generic. Like Veep's writers, The Franchise's have certainly done their research, and even its most ridiculous developments have roots in reality. Eric is clearly a proxy for the slew of promising indie filmmakers who have gotten ground up in the Marvel machine, and the PR crisis spawned by the studio's cancellation of a female-focused superhero movie parallels the fate of Batgirl , the DC movie that HBO's own boss, David Zaslav, unceremoniously discarded. The latter storyline gives rise to The Franchise's best episode, "The Lilac Ghost," in which newly installed producer Anita (Aya Cash) is ordered to beef up the role of Tecto's only female character in order to handle Maximum's "woman problem." (It doesn't take long for her to surmise that the studio's issues with gender parity are also why she's been brought on to the movie.)

Rather than relishing the opportunity to strike a blow for female empowerment and be a role model for a generation of young girls, the actress who plays the Lilac Ghost, a beleaguered Katherine Waterston, is simply desperate to wrap her part and get off set. But then, no one on the set of Tecto ever considers treating the adjustment as anything other than a way to get complaining fans off their backs. Anita asks to have a female playwright whose name she can't quite recall rushed to the set for a quick round of rewrites—shades of Nicole Holofcener's uncredited Black Widow polish —but Maximum's newfound commitment to girl power is expressed mostly in details like increasing the length of the Lilac Ghost's power staff, which naturally causes the movie's male star to fret that his own weapon looks puny in comparison.

Perhaps there was a point at which the people involved in Tecto and the Maximum universe writ large believed they were involved in something meaningful, but that impulse has receded so far that it's barely a vestigial twitch. Sure, Eric is convinced he's using a movie about a hero who harnesses the power of sound waves through an invisible jackhammer to make a statement about fracking, but he doesn't seem to have the slightest idea what that statement might be, let alone how to make it when he spends his days battling the studio over whether his scenes are too dimly lit, because "the culture demands a saturated aesthetic." The closest thing the show has to heroes are the below-the-line stalwarts who keep the production's wheels from falling off: Patel's first A.D.; Lolly Adefope's Dag, a newly arrived third assistant director who thinks she can wangle her way to an executive producer credit with a few deft power moves; and Jessica Hynes' Steph, the long-suffering assistant trying to keep Eric on the right side of sanity. There's nothing noble in their struggle, exactly, but at least it's clear what they actually do.

The Franchise isn't a stake through the heart of superhero movies, but the genre is already doing just fine dying on its own. If the show has something to say, it's not about fracking, but about the point at which work becomes meaningless—not just your particular job, but all of them, so much that the idea of even trying to make it matter becomes absurd. "Every time I find a hill to die on, I die on it," Eric laments, "and then I'm just dead on a hill." The best you can do is extinguish your dignity and dive in, as Grant's jobbing thespian does, with a hearty "Let's eat shit!" If you can't make anything meaningful, you might as well make a quick buck.