“Paddy Chayefsky, who thrived during TV’s ‘golden age’ of live drama, didn’t claim to be predicting the future when he wrote ‘Network’ in 1976 — but the movie, now celebrating its 30th anniversary, may be the most prophetic ever made,” Tom Shales blogs on TVWeek.com. “It was set in ‘the present’ — network anchorman Howard Beale is fired on Sept. 22, 1975, as the film opens — but Chayefsky took prevailing trends and extended them to outrageous extremes that now, unfortunately, don’t seem all that extreme or outrageous.”
“It’s not satire, it’s sheer reportage,” director Sidney Lumet says on the 30th anniversary two-disc DVD of Network…
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