Hollywood loves a navel-gazing satire about the movie business. Audiences do too, when given a good reason, from the upbeat mockery of 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” to the excoriation of a studio executive in 1992’s “The Player,

Is the comics-to-screen formula played out? Yes. Should this series work harder to make good jokes about that? Yes.

Himesh Patel leads the comedy produced by Armando Iannucci and Sam Mendes, set behind the scenes of a big-budget comic book adaptation.