What “The TV Set” lacks in humanity it more than makes up for in satirical outrage. There’s an anger to this story of art being held hostage by “the man” — anger that finally gives way to acquiescence as we realize there’s no use rationalizing this form of insanity — you just need to laugh it off. It’s entirely plausible that this is what Christopher Guest meant last fall’s “For Your Consideration” to be — a movie that takes more than a few swipes at the entertainment industry but ultimately hugs its characters out of a mix of pity and affection. Yet something about Mr. Guest’s satire seemed resolutely mean-spirited — we laughed down at those Oscar-obsessed movie stars with a sense of superiority — while in “The TV Set” our laughs, and cringes, are not at the characters’ expense so much as in their defense. At the center is mild-mannered Mike (David Duchovny), the creator of a television show that he desperately wants to become a series. The show is about a man learning how to continue with life after his brother’s suicide. One day he gets the call that a pilot is being green-lighted — the call that every writer dreams about — but this is less the end of Mike’s uphill journey than the beginning of an arduous and horrifying process through which he will lose all control over his baby.

It starts simply enough, over a disagreement between Mike and the network brass — led by Lenny (Sigourney Weaver), a shrewd, shrill, power-obsessed network president — about the lead actor. The network wants a cute face, Mike wants a solid acting talent, and, of course, Mike caves, convincing himself that he can make it work anyway.

But this turf battle is only a preview of the war to come. Soon executives are visiting the set and noticing a few things they’d like to tweak. Why must there be a suicide, they ask, and why does it need to be his brother? In one perfectly pitched scene of quiet agony, Mike stands speechless and listens to their idea of turning this into a comedy about a mother’s death. He squints at Lenny, the woman who has made both his biggest dream and worst nightmare come true, and marvels at how the executives seem to know nothing about this show, or what inspiration propels it.

Yet things are only to get worse. Intent on altering the entire premise of the show, Lenny asks Mike to film a second version and to put both pilots in front of test audiences that seem less than intelligent (actually, they seem to fall just this side of brain damaged). Their decisions lead to story changes, directing changes, and editing changes, and as Mike slips into a psychosomatic sickness, his show’s tears are airbrushed and replaced with flatulence, punch lines, and pratfalls.

Directed by Jake Kasdan (“Orange County”), who also directed a number of episodes of the ill-fated, brilliant television series “Freaks and Geeks,” “The TV Set” offers an intimacy that leaves the story feeling less like an all-out satire or comedy than a sad shrug of the shoulders, filled with wistful thoughts of what might have been. It’s clear that this movie was made by someone purging himself of the demons we see haunting Mike.

It’s worth noting that this is a complicated sentiment to convey without seeming pretentious. This is not a movie that wants to laugh at the television world or yell at its many foolish executives; rather, “The TV Set” seems to regard the whole process with a distanced sense of dismay. One can almost hear Mr. Kasdan, who also wrote the film, explaining the theme with an Edward R. Murrow-ish disgust: Is this what this medium has become? Do we have nothing more worthy of television’s magic than farts and laugh tracks?

The test audience sequences, in particular, have a scary aura about them — not just for the audience, but for the way the network executives hang on their every word and gesture. As Mike and Lenny watch real-time results play out on the television screen, a zig-zagging bar chart laid over the top of the show’s image literally blurs the line between art and commerce before our eyes.

All of which leads to the story’s final, wonderfully ambiguous home stretch. As the show is wrestled from Mike’s nearly comatose hands and finally unveiled for its first public screening, we peer into Mr. Duchovny’s eyes in search of a way to read all this. Is it a travesty? A farce? Utterly preposterous? Almost any other movie, satire or not, would end with some sort of parting shot, some final survey of the freak show. But as far as Mr. Kasdan is concerned, and for as much as Mr. Duchovny reveals, there’s no real easy sentiment to take away from all this. In Mike’s eyes, we see nothing but the gaze of the walking dead — the faint recognition that this beast is too big to tame, too strong to fight.

Of course, the title doesn’t refer to that flat screen sitting in our apartment. It refers to the crowd — the elite set — of those in the television industry who actively preside over this wasteland of the unappreciated (“Arrested Development”), the unhealthy (“The Simple Life”), and the undeserving (“American Idol”). This is their story, these are their crimes.