Last week, as part of its quixotic, nearly decade-long effort to modernize Meet the Press and satisfy Chuck Todd’s enduring and perhaps obstinate vision for a 24/7, multi-platform media mini-empire built on the back of a 75-year-old Sunday show, NBC News announced that it had hired a new executive producer: David P. Gelles, late of the late CNN+. The move comes just over a year after NBC hired the much-beloved Carrie Budoff Brown, then Politico’s top editor, to expand the MTP franchise, and three months after the network announced that it would once again rebrand the MTP website, once again overhaul the MTP newsletter, and once again launch a new MTP blog—a flurry of moves betraying a wistful belief that, with enough product launches and relaunches, one can effectively will an analog brand into digital relevance.

After all, let’s be honest: NBC News is already a chaotic brand architecture, a tug-of-war zone encompassing liberal valhalla MSNBC, the more staid nightly news program, a general interest news website that seems mired in another generation, and much much more. Meet the Press is a historic Sunday show that didn’t really ever have the brand permission to veer out on its own. I’m not trying to be obnoxious here; Todd is a respected and well-liked guy, but it’s just not clear what Meet the Press looks like beyond a staged and choreographed interview show with Beltway influencers. In fact, on a macro level, media is following the long arc toward authenticity, and MTP belongs to a generation when television news was theatrical and grand. Alas, you can’t turn back time.