“Classical music has been losing money for people for 500 years,” an orchestra administrator tells her numbers-obsessed colleague in the new Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle.” “It’s not a business.”

As a vision of the inner workings of a major New York symphony, “Mozart” is sexed-up, druggy, lovably daffy and patently fictional. But at unexpectedly truthful, revealing moments like this, I wanted to make it required viewing for American orchestra boards, which have lately tended to hold their institutions to standards of profitability more suitable for industry than the nonprofit arts.

“Mozart in the Jungle,” based on a 2005 tell-all book by the oboist Blair Tindall, is the latest original series from Amazon, which won the Golden Globe for best television comedy or musical for “Transparent” this month, and on Tuesday it announced that it had hired Woody Allen to write and direct his first television series.

Worlds away from the sober dark comedy of “Transparent,” “Mozart” seems at first glance to be a fanciful exercise in magical realism. A community dance party breaks out after a rehearsal held in an abandoned lot; a parrot swoops onto a podium; a white horse appears in a country house living room. At one point the series’ namesake himself arrives, bewigged, to advise a charismatic upstart conductor, clearly inspired by the Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel and played by Gael García Bernal, with charm and deranged gusto.