Last week, as seemingly everyone around me was going nuts for the strip-club caper “Hustlers,” I found myself binge-rewatching a dark workplace comedy of a quite different sort. “Party Down,” which is streaming on Hulu, aired for only two seasons, on Starz, in 2009 and 2010, and, not unlike “Hustlers,” it follows members of an often overlooked subsection of the service industry—in this case the employees of a second-rate, Los Angeles-based catering service—as they navigate the indignities of the post-recession work environment. But “Hustlers” is a crime romp whose girl-power stripper heroines band together and attempt to turn the tables on their sleazy Wall Street clients; “Party Down” doesn’t allow for any such grand transformations. Instead, the characters, who are, largely, failed and failing entertainment-industry aspirants, slog through a variety of more or less debasing events (each episode portrays the crew working a different party, from a sweet-sixteen celebration on a boat to a suburban orgy to a mingle for senior-citizen singles), dully passing around canapés and flutes of middling white wine for minimum wage as their dreams slip between their fingers.

This might all begin to sound like a Dardenne-brothers production, except that “Party Down” is a comedy—if an occasionally downbeat one—and there are lots of laughs to be found in the various mishaps and mortifications of the catering circuit. Many of these laughs are, in fact, brought about by the idiocy of the crew itself, which includes among its ranks some hilariously low-capacity individuals. There’s the “team leader,” Ron Donald (the incredible Ken Marino), a sympathetically pathetic, grin-and-bear-it alcoholic who white-knuckles through his shifts by fantasizing about a better life running an all-you-can-eat Soup ‘R Crackers restaurant (“fastest-growing non-poultry, non-coffee franchise in all of Southern California!”). There’s Kyle (Ryan Hansen), a blond, generically handsome boob who is always auditioning for bit roles on “The O.C.”-style shows (“Acting is like crime, but, instead of using guns or knives, I assault you with emotions”), and his nemesis, Roman (Martin Starr), a proto-incel who writes “hard sci-fi” (“I have an influential blog!”). There’s also Constance (the perfect Jane Lynch), a clueless onetime D-lister, cheerfully and unselfconsciously still hammering at her nonexistent career (“Did you hear about Calum’s dad? He has a production company and they’re thinking of doing a live-action ‘Old McDonald’ for kids! And he thinks I have a quality!”), and, in the show’s second season, Lydia (Megan Mullally), a hysterically perky, bespectacled divorcée, who is intent on making her daughter, Escapade, a star.

This cast of lovable dummies forms the backdrop against which the show’s protagonists appear: Henry Pollard (Adam Scott), an actor who has decided to quit the profession but is still forever compelled by punters to repeat, mirthlessly, the catchphrase from his biggest break, a viral beer commercial (“Are we having fun yet??”); and Casey Klein (Lizzy Caplan), a comedian whose occasional, minor career wins are barely enough to keep her from throwing in the towel. The heart of “Party Down” resides in the genuinely realistic, genuinely hot relationship between Henry and Casey, as it toggles from attraction to hostility to anger to affection and back again. But, even with its more foolish characters, the show makes a case—comical but still resonant—that underneath the ill-fitting button-down caterer’s shirts and pink elastic-band bow ties are real people. Losers have interior lives, too, ones that might be richer and more textured than one could ever imagine.