Television has been very good to Aaron Sorkin, who made a splashy Broadway debut in 1989 with “A Few Good Men” and practically booked the next flight to Hollywood. Eighteen years and six Emmy Award nominations later, he returns the favor with “The Farnsworth Invention,” simultaneously kissing and biting the hand that fed him.

With this reductive but nonetheless diverting behind-the-scenes chronicle of TV’s earliest days, Mr. Sorkin (“The West Wing,” “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”) has brought over some unfortunate habits from the left coast, including a tendency to create dramatic parallels where none exist and a weakness for soupy background music. But he has also imported his shrewd ear for plotting and his unmistakable flair for well-crafted paragraphs caroming off the halls of power. And he has found in Des McAnuff the rare director capable of turning all those painstakingly assembled anecdotes into a breezy parable, one about two men with huge dreams and the invention that proved bigger and more rapacious than even they could imagine.

David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria), who fled the shtetel of Minsk as a boy and was the president of RCA before his 40th birthday, is rarely seen without an expensive pen clenched in his hand. By contrast, Philo T. Farnsworth (Jimmi Simpson), a Mormon farm boy from Iowa with one year of college under his belt and a knack for science, keeps his hands jammed into his pockets. And while both wear three-piece suits, Sarnoff’s pinstripes fall beautifully off his shoulders, while about two extra inches of tweed pool around Farnsworth’s ankles. The tow-headed Farnsworth rarely straightens his tie or combs his hair. He’s too busy inventing television.

The play’s title makes it abundantly clear with whom Mr. Sorkin’s sympathies lie. During the 1930s, Farnsworth squared off against RCA in the patent courts over who deserved credit for figuring out how to transmit moving pictures electronically. A quick mental tabulation of the number of RCA televisions on the market as opposed to the number of Farnsworth televisions should provide a clue as to who ultimately came out on top.

In a rather half-hearted attempt to level the playing field, Mr. Sorkin has made Sarnoff not merely a wily Machaivel — “The ends do justify the means, that’s what means are for” — but also the standard-bearer for responsible media. Farnsworth may be up against the corporate suits of RCA, but Sarnoff’s quest for high-minded news and entertainment unsullied by Madison Avenue is only slightly less quixotic. He repeatedly invokes the power of television to raise America up, and if accruing the power to do so means obliterating some “ridiculous hayseed savant,” so be it.

Mr. Sorkin cleverly entrusts Sarnoff and Farnsworth with narrating each other’s life story, complete with the occasional fact-checking squabble. (As news reports have pointed out in recent weeks, extensive liberties have been taken within this protracted and enormously complicated story.) And the two actors’ styles mesh together well: Mr. Azaria’s crisp, wary Sarnoff provides a durable counterweight to Mr. Simpson’s blinkered, increasingly embittered Farnsworth, the sort of man who desperately hatches pipe-dream medical schemes even as doctors are trying to save his infant son.

But while the rest of the 19-member cast succeeds at nearly every little thing they’re asked to do, little things are all they get to do. Only Alexandra Wilson and Nadia Bowers, as the long-suffering wives of Farnsworth and Sarnoff, receive even the tiniest assignments beyond barking Mr. Sorkin’s silken words at one of the two TV pioneers.

Aided in no small part by Mr. McAnuff’s liquid staging, the author once again makes multisyllabic wonkery comprehensible, even enjoyable. Mr. Sorkin also proves a dab hand at slipping pertinent and even crucial plot points into the narrative unobtrusively. But several scenes — a “Eureka” moment for Farnsworth, a portentous confrontation between Sarnoff and his disapproving wife, a contrived finale that plunks undeserved warmth onto what is ultimately a very sad story — smack of authorial interference.

These writerly embellishments pale, however, compared to a late confrontation between the two men that crackles with resentments (“I won’t lie to you, Mr. Sarnoff, the billion dollars I’m not gonna get might have come in handy”) and, this being an Aaron Sorkin play, would-be stirring paeans to decency and good government. With its distillation of the fears and self-justifications that have fueled these two men, it brings to mind the 3 a.m. confessional that Richard Nixon made to his inquisitor, David Frost, in last season’s “Frost/Nixon.” And, like that equally memorable sequence, the Sarnoff/Farnsworth meeting never took place, although Sarnoff at least admits as much. Victors have that luxury.

Open run (239 W. 45th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).