It makes perfect sense that for his first Broadway play in 18 years Aaron Sorkin would tell the stories of Philo Farnsworth and David Sarnoff. The rough-edged Mormon inventor and the smooth founder of NBC provide the verbal equivalent of a bluegrass banjo and a virtuosic violin – right down to a classic Sorkinian reversal: the hick is the amateur Heifetz.

Throughout the 1920s, these two men raced to invent the medium in which the 46-year-old Sorkin, more than any American writer of his generation, has excelled: television. Farnsworth, imbued with goofy drive by Jimmi Simpson, survived a small-town childhood and assembled a motley technical crew in San Francisco: they stand for the unglamorous spirit of American know-how.