Network is a furious and infuriating tangle. Is it a brilliant shocking corrosive satire on America's dwelling in screened imitations of reality, or is it a snake devouring its own tail? Is the satire cleansing or only huckster raillery, responsible anger turned into self-contempt or the cynicism that ravishes every ideal? It is a reckless but literate film, incoherent and pretentious, piercing yet evasive. It is itself very like TV, the monster it mocks…. Network is thunderously written and a...

[After] zealously attacking the labyrinthine bureaucracy of metropolitan hospitals in Hospital, Paddy Chayefsky has now turned his fervor toward the inner workings of a large television network [in Network]. Chayefsky has dubbed his fictional network the United Broadcasting System, a self-enclosed world of corporate clashes and power struggles which heartlessly creates and destroys its own lifeblood. Television as a scapegoat for contemporary dehumanization and dying democratic values is an unwieldy metapho...