Making movies, and neuroses

In a way, it's a mistake to qualify ''Hopeless Pictures" as simply a goof on Hollywood. While the show is set deep in the culture of self-important studio deal makers, test audiences, and Oscar lust, it's also universal enough to serve as a sharp-toothed comedy of modern manners. There are cellphone farces and there are Botox disasters. And there is a psychiatrist (voiced by Jonathan Katz) who is the epitome of a narcissistic sleazeball talking on speaker phone to one client while another lies on his office couch. Dr. Stein's favorite line: ''All your problems are real."

Stein is a central character on the show, in that most of the employees at Wax's Hopeless Pictures seem to be in his care. Tracy (Jennifer Coolidge) is a Hopeless executive who checks in with him by phone on her way to lunch with a screenwriter, where she plans to have sex to close the deal (she does). Another Hopeless executive, Sam (Bob Balaban, the show's creator), is Mel's neurotic nephew, and he's so whiny he puts Stein to sleep. In a constant state of panic attack, Sam can't quite get up the moxie to perform his duties.

And of course Mel calls Stein constantly to process his work woes and his infidelities. Mel is in a nonstop state of crisis, as he juggles a doomed film production in Zagreb, Croatia, and a wife who just found another woman's panties in his car. And he's so low down in the Hollywood pecking order, he can't schedule an appointment with ''dentist to the stars" Dr. Glimmerglass until six years from now. No Harvey Weinstein, he.

The characters in ''Hopeless Pictures" are drawn with childlike lines, their most colorful attributes being their mouths, which they all like to use. But it's an adult comedy that clearly enjoys ribbing the Los Angeles lifestyle and the world of entertainment. It breaks no new ground, but it treads a familiar path with glee.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.