Issue Date: February 26, 2006
STILL "MAD AS HELL"
Rating the TV satire "Network"
THE PLOT: When anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is forced to retire from fourth-ranked UBS Television, he announces he'll commit suicide during his final show. The network brass, including Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), panic before realizing Beale might draw the channel's highest ratings.
The 30th anniversary DVD is out Tuesday.
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Insider's credentials: Robert Thompson, founding director of Syracuse University's Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, is a guru of the small screen. His book, "Television in the Antenna Age," was published in 2004.
OVERVIEW: "It still plays really funny, trenchant and creepy. I remember when I first saw "Network" and [their proposal for] "The Mao Tse-tung Hour." How outrageous! We haven't gotten that far yet. But the day I watched the DVD, we were in the middle of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing and a war, and all I saw on the news was video of a 7-year-old driving a truck in traffic."
Scene 9: Angry prophet -- Beale asks colleagues, "What's wrong with ... denouncing the hypocrisies of our times?"
"Listen to some of the rants on prime time; it's not completely unrelated to what we hear from Beale. Guys like Bill O'Reilly, James Carville, Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh have a lot of Beale in them. They say things people are thinking, so they have a prophetlike appeal."
Scene 15: Mad as hell -- Beale tells viewers to yell out their windows, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" They comply.
"That kind of impact [from TV] is rare now. Then, everyone was watching the three networks. But we see TV's influence in less dangerous ways. When "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" debuted, you couldn't go anywhere without hearing, 'Is that your final answer?' "
-- Melanie D.G. Kaplan
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