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,

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

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

HBO comedy 'The Franchise' goes behind-the-scenes of a fictional movie franchise to satirize the artistic bankruptcies driving modern blockbusters.

This satiric takedown comes from Armando Iannucci ("Veep") and Jon Brown ("Succession").

The state of big-budget studio filmmaking obviously isn't as consequential as the state of a dysfunctional, ego-driven, often deeply ridiculous U.S. government. Yet for those who obsessively follow the former,