I first watched Network in the early 2000s, when the film would have been around twenty-five years old. It felt daring and sharp, a biting satire of talk shows and reality television that saturated the 90s and 2000s. Network was prescient then. Watching it now, fifty years after its 1976 release, it feels downright prophetic. Today you can go pick up the film in a wonderful new edition from The Criterion Collection.

Directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Paddy Chayefsky, Network begins in apparent normalcy. There’s a shot of television screens showing the evening news talking heads. Maybe they’re saying something important. I’m not sure. I wasn’t really listening. The mundanity feels intentional, as if we are about to get a straightforward portrait of the inner workings of a corporate network.

The camera settles on one of those faces: Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch in his final film role. A voiceover informs us that Beale has been fired due to low ratings, effective in two weeks. The news was delivered by his friend Max Schumaker (William Holden), the news division president. The two men go out, get drunk, and Beale, practically asleep on the bar, floats the idea of killing himself on the air. Surely that would boost ratings. Who knows how often they’ve blustered like this before? It’s no surprise Max doesn’t take him seriously.

Soon we are guided through the familiar choreography of a newsroom preparing for broadcast. Makeup, lights, cameras, all of the operators in place. It’s all so routine, so procedural, that no one registers what is happening when something remarkable is happening. With no dramatic change, Beale calmly informs viewers that he has been fired due to poor ratings and, having nothing left to live for, will shoot himself on the following Tuesday’s program, generously giving the PR team a week to promote the show.

This has all happened five minutes into this exceptional film.

At first, the network treats Beale’s outburst as a crisis and goes straight to damage control. Max, who still believes in the dignity of news — even as his own authority is eroding — brings Beale back on air to steady things and reassure viewers. Instead, Beale again abandons whatever script everyone thought he’d deliver and begins railing against the fraudulence of everything—politics, business, television itself. It is the kind of moment that should end a career. And yet, despite panic in the control room, Max tells his staff to keep the cameras rolling.

The outrage among the executives is, of course, natural and proper. A trusted anchor has just unraveled on live television. Surely heads will roll. But what is truly unsettling is the speed with which this panic turns into potential. Viewers are not turning away . . .

Here’s Robert Duvall’s Frank Hacket, who has been suitable outraged, turning that outrage into a smile:

And here is Diana Christensen, played by Faye Dunaway, who understands before anyone else what they have stumbled upon. Far from being a liability, Beale is a golden goose.

And so Beale’s effort to speak plainly, to be genuine and rage against even his own network, becomes just another commodity. When he storms back into the studio soaked in rain and commands viewers to throw open their windows and shout, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” it is spontaneous and feels freeing. And Diana knows just how to package it.

The newsroom cannot contain him for long. His message requires better lighting. A larger stage. Soon he is no longer a news anchor having a breakdown but a prophet framed by stained glass, complete with a live audience.

But this is just one of the fascinating, and troubling, threads of Network. It’s highly serious and seriously absurd. We get Ned Beatty delivering another chilling sermon: “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature,” he tells Beale. “You must atone.”

It’s a corporate briefing with Old Testament overtones as Beatty’s executive declares that we now live in the age of corporations, that politics, nations, even democracy itself are secondary systems. It is a speech delivered as revelation. Watching it today, it is difficult to believe this film is fifty years old. Its vision of corporate theology and monetized outrage feels like Chayefsky was writing about today.

Network is a tremendous film, and this brief reflection barely scratches its surface. The new Criterion Collection release is an exceptional way to experience it. The 4K restoration is stunning, and it is accompanied by a commentary from Sidney Lumet and two strong documentaries, Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words (2025) and The Making of “Network” (2006). If you’ve never seen it before (and if you have then it’s a film that is always worth revisiting), then it’s time.