When screenwriter, playwright, television scenarist, and denouncer of leftist pieties and prejudices Paddy Chayefsky wrote the movie Network in 1976, he made television seem awfully small. Here was a film, released by that most forward-looking of studios, United Artists, with A-list movie stars (Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall) and several bona fide screen legends (William Holden, Peter Finch) appearing as assorted on-air and behind-the-scenes personnel from a fictitious broadcast network. Because of the trenchant tone of the film and the magnitude of its cast, Network had the effect of diminishing its subject, cutting it down to size. The movie made TV seem tawdry, cheap, and as disposable as a pack of gum.

The Apple TV+ series The Morning Show has a near-identical setting and similar star power: Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and a dizzying supporting cast that, at various points, has included Billy Crudup, Julianna Margulies, and Marion Cotillard. But it is not Network, neither in greatness nor impact. This series comes not to bury broadcast television but to make legacy media — even when seen through the lens of a made-up morning show on a made-up network with lots of over-the-top characters — seem important and worth caring about. Of course, the show’s writers acknowledge that they are depicting what one character calls “the last fledgling embers of a formerly great media empire,” but all the effort and energy expended to portray that empire suggests a desperate attempt to extend the relevance of legacy media.