The following contains spoilers for The Franchise season 1 episode 5, “Scene 83: Enter the Gurgler,” now streaming on MaxThe Franchise‘s latest exploration of real-world conflicts in the world of blockbuster filmmaking highlights a long-standing debate about directors. The comedy has been a prickly parody of the film industry as a whole, with many specific gags targeted at the process by which superhero tent-pole films are produced. The Franchise‘s cast of characters take a number of standard production archetypes and reinvents them in a consistently silly but surprisingly somber way.