![Network: A Satire That Stopped Being One](https://cdn.slatesource.com/9/8/2/982fd1f6-5609-446f-8cac-ab005937ef15.webp)

# Network: A Satire That Stopped Being One

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/network-a-satire-that-stopped-being-one)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/9/8/2/982fd1f6-5609-446f-8cac-ab005937ef15.webp)

## Network (1976)

Chayefsky wrote it as an absurd exaggeration of television news. Every absurdity in it has since been implemented.

Runtime

121 minutes

Director

Sidney Lumet

Budget

$3.8 million

Box office

$23.7 million worldwide

Cinematography

Owen Roizman

> I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore.

## Ratings As The Only Value

An anchorman is fired for low ratings, announces on air that he will kill himself on the following Tuesday's broadcast, and becomes the most valuable asset the network has. From there the film simply follows the incentives. A news division is moved under entertainment, a programming executive builds a lineup around a terrorist cell and a psychic, and the prophet in the raincoat is kept on air while he is visibly unwell because the numbers are good. Chayefsky's dialogue is written to be performed at full volume and Lumet shoots it with progressively more artificial lighting as the film goes on, so the picture itself turns into television. Nothing in it was plausible in 1976 and nearly all of it is now standard practice.

journey·6 Movements

# Watching Network

Hope

/

Movement

Two Weeks Notice

Discarded

"Two old friends get drunk over the news that one of them is finished at sixty and past his ratings."

Peter Finch died two months before the ceremony and became the first actor to win Best Actor posthumously. His widow accepted it.

Ned Beatty is on screen for about five minutes and was nominated for the boardroom monologue, which Chayefsky wrote as a single unbroken speech and Lumet shot with the lights coming up on cue.

[Network on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/?utm_source=slatesource)