Network always struck me as shrill camp. I’m surprised people took it so seriously.
A lot of it is shrill camp, what makes it powerful is that the shrillest campiest parts are so true. Compare any of the Mad Prophet segments to Glenn Beck when he starts the waterworks, or O’Reilly when he’s thumping, or Olbermann when he was working on getting fired. Network was the first time we got to see why the TV comes first in “TV news”, and it predicted the modern age of it.
Of course when made Network seemed far-fetched, but if you see network TV today, you’ll see that Chayefsky was a prophet.