Sitcom satire mimics the reality

You know you’re at an industry screening when audience members tote copies of Bill Carter’s “Desperate Executives” and cram diligently as they await the curtain rising for “The TV Set,” Jake Kasdan’s satire about the life of one television pilot during pilot season. Actually, they were probably TV wannabes (those mentioned in the book have no doubt already read it), but that still translates into a boisterous, and packed, house for the Los Angeles premiere of the film on Wednesday.

For those who like “The Larry Sanders Show” and “Entourage” and are eagerly awaiting the fall TV premieres of Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” (about the backstage drama at a sketch comedy show) and Tina Fey’s “30 Rock” (about the backstage comedy at a sketch comedy show), this is your movie, with enough verisimilitude for the TV industry, that participants in the Boob Tube beast might feel like popping some Xanax afterward.

This is a movie charting how the sausages are made in the sausage factory. It tracks the journey of a sitcom, from casting through shooting, testing and, ultimately, presentation to a bevy of journalists and media buyers at the so-called upfronts. The sitcom’s hapless creator is played by David Duchovny, with Judy Greer as his manager, Ioan Gruffudd as a British TV executive in the process of selling his soul and Sigourney Weaver as the sociopathic lady devil who runs the network.

Unlike her East Coast counterpart -- Meryl Streep’s chilly editrix in “The Devil Wears Prada” -- Weaver’s creation is a cheerful vulgarian in an expensive pantsuit who relies religiously on the creative input of her 14-year-old daughter and makes sunny pronouncements like, “Originality scares me.” When evaluating actresses trying out for the lead of the sitcom, she muses that one candidate “doesn’t let her cuteness get in the way of her hotness

While many industry satires opt to portray suits as hyper-aggressive and in-your-face (the Jeremy Piven type), “The TV Set” presents a countervailing, equally true vision of power plays sugarcoated in happy talk. Edicts are delivered with faux ego-soothing words. Everyone is always sunny in California, even as they wield scalpels.

The evolution of the sitcom is what you’d expect -- dumb to dumber to dumbest -- but the acting is deft and dead-on, and makes an audience long for more amusing vehicles for a talent like Weaver’s, who seems to be disappearing from the screen as she creeps closer to the age-of-no-return for actresses.

After the screening, Kasdan, a pint-sized director in the J.J. Abrams mold, answered questions from the audience. He was joined by cast members Greer, Duchovny, Justine Bateman, Lindsay Sloane and Willie Garson, who all seemed determined to speak as little as possible and kept passing the microphone among them like a hot potato.

Kasdan, who worked on the series “Freaks and Geeks” and directed the film “Orange County,” said the movie was “not clearly autobiographical” because he’d had some nice experiences in the medium. He also noted that when making a TV pilot, “the Catch-22 is that the network is never really fully committed to the [show] until an unbelievable amount of success has happened.”

Afterward, one audience member raised her hand and stated, “I’ve worked in sitcoms for the last 10 years. Thanks to your movie, I think I quit.”