For Aniston, who is the spine of the show as both a lead and an executive producer , it’s the chance to dig into a more sophisticated dramatic role that, as she put it, has everything: “ children, guilt, power struggle, being a woman in the industry, going through a divorce, publicly going through a divorce, feeling alienated, being just a little bit of a screw-up.”

It’s a role that is asking her to draw on more of her personal life than ever before. And it may also be her best chance to finally get the world to see her as an actor, not just a star.

‘We basically just started over’

“The Morning Show” didn’t begin as a #MeToo story.

Three years ago, when Aniston told Michael Ellenberg, a former executive at HBO who oversaw “Game of Thrones” and “The Leftovers,” that “television is not not an option for me,” Matt Lauer was still delivering the morning news and Harvey Weinstein was gunning for Oscars. “I said to him, ‘I just want to be a part of something great, I don’t care where it lands,’” Aniston recalled. “Because God knows, the movies have been great and they’ve been horrible, so you just don’t know.”

When Ellenberg later phoned Aniston to tell her he’d acquired rights to “Top of the Morning,” a nonfiction book by the media reporter Brian Stelter that delves into the drama-filled world of morning television — and had also spoken to Reese Witherspoon, with whom he worked on “Big Little Lies” — the women immediately called each other.

“We were so psyched,” said Witherspoon, who has known Aniston since they played sisters on “Friends.” She noted that the two had wanted to work together for some time, but that it was rare to have “two very, fully fleshed out female leads in one project.”