The difficulty in appreciating "Network", in terms of how prescient and radical it was upon release, is that much of what Chayefsky was predicting has long ago come to be. I listened to Sidney Lumet's commentary on the bluray a few weeks ago and it was very illuminating - highly recommend it, but I'm seriously biased when it comes to Mr Lumet. Surely the mark of a truly great film is that there are numerous memorable scenes, and by that standard "Network" is right up there (Ned Beatty playing God in the darkened boardroom my favourite). Tragic that Chayefsky died relatively young, but quite a legacy he left behind. Seriously - what the hell went so right with movies in the 1970s?

They don't make movies with dialogue like that anymore. Certainly not with dialogue that includes words like "prescient", "foundering","auspicatory" "adamantine", "imbued" and "jeremiad". In an interview Paddy Chayefsky gave for "The Craft of Screenwriting" he said that the love story between Diana and Max was the core of the picture. That their relationship was metaphorical; she represented the biz; he represented humanity. He said that he structured the story around their tumultuous relationship.

Interesting observation. I doubt if most people would remember Network as a love story, yet it makes sense. In some ways, the relationship between Max and Diana is the emotional center of the story, as you note, the push-pull between TV (Diana) and humanity (Max), flawed as the latter is. It also speaks to the importance of having some type of emotional subplot into which the viewer / script reader can plug. Think Inception. Evidently the original conceit was a caper movie. But it took Nolan a decade to finish the script and only after he realized he needed to give the story some heart, hence the subplot of Cobb trying to get back to his children [positive] and resolve issues with Mal [negative], both playing out in the emotional / psychological realm.

[...] Script To Screen: “Network” (gointothestory.blcklst.com) [...]