I too saw Network previously before rewatching it recently, and I too, as you put it, "didn't get it" the first time. At least you had the excuse of alcohol; even perfectly sober it went over my head. I think that, like you, my problem was that it wasn't what I had expected. Going in, I knew of its reputation as a great, scathing depiction of network television, and of Peter Finch's famous "I'm mad as hell" speech (or rant, rather). What I got was a sprawling, ambitious phantasmagoria, both chillingly realistic and recognizable and absolutely insane and ridiculous, as if we too have lost our minds and are drifting away from reality right alongside Howard Beale.
Though I think that's another thing that kept me from connecting to it the first time around. Given how (rightly) famous the Beale character and Finch's performance are, I went in under the impression that the story was about him. But, of course, it's really about William Holden's character, TV news executive Max Schumacher, who acts as the one sane man left in an insane world (or he at least merely remembers what sanity was, even if he has trouble adhering to it). Beale is a circus freak having a nervous breakdown, not a prophet experiencing an epiphany, much less a relatable protagonist around whom to build a story. Even his insanity is inconsistent: he goes from saying "bullshit" on live TV, to the "I'm mad as hell" speech, to railing against corporations and Arab power and fainting, to resigning himself to democracy's end. Schumacher, on the other hand, struggles to make sense of the degenerating world in which he finds himself and to maintain his beloved news division's integrity, and his own, and in that respect we're in the same boat as he, imperfect though he is.
Watching Network, I was reminded of a topic I read about recently in class, namely the relaxation of solicitation restrictions on lawyers from the 1970s on. Bar associations used to circumscribe narrowly, and in many instances outright ban, lawyers from advertising their services or soliciting clients, as degrading the profession. But starting in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona (1977), the Supreme Court held that such outright bans violated freedom of speech and has, for the most part, struck them down. Although there've been both positive and negative effects of allowing lawyers to advertise, it inarguably reflects a shift in perspective from viewing the law as a profession to viewing it as a business. We see the very same, simultaneous process in Network with regard to TV news, with growing concern from upper management about audience shares and ad revenue as the days of Ed Murrow fade into history. (Though we should remember, lest we or Schumacher get too nostagic for the good old days, that Murrow had many of the same criticisms of the TV news of his own day, as seen in the speech depicted in Good Night, and Good Luck.)
The problem, of course, is that what people need to see often isn't what they want to see. But watching UBS bastardize itself—not just the evening news, but its entertainment programming as well, like co-opting leftist revolutionaries into becoming money-hungry TV personalities—the fiction of Network in 1976 made me think of the fact of the Fox network in the late '80s and early '90s; that's meant not so much as a criticism as an acknowledgement of the paradigm shift that Fox helped to bring about. Coming at a time when The Cosby Show and Murder, She Wrote were the top shows on TV, Fox's programming featured Married...with Children, The Simpsons, In Living Color, and COPS, which a lot of people (sometimes rightly) looked down the noses at as lowest-common-demoninator dreck dumbing down the airwaves but which also tapped into a lot of popular tastes and succeeded as a result. Whereas UBS has to be a "whorehouse network" (as Robert Duvall's character puts it) to stay in the ratings game, Fox had to do the same just to get started. (Those were, after all, still the days of the Big Three.)
YOU'VE JUST CROSSED OVER INTO . . . THE SPOILER ZONE
So the question remains, do we sacrifice professionalism for ratings? Do we sacrifice art for money? The answer isn't as cut-and-dried at it may seem, since very little art is free, and the art that the public can actually experience and appreciate (which is what every artist wants) never is. Schumacher was dedicated to professionalism, but if people would rather have Beale's jeremiads, Sibyl the Soothsayer, and the weekly Ecumenical Liberation Army attack, then all the professionalism in the world won't pay for FCC licenses or bring in the ad revenue that pays for the nightly news. The crowning irony of Network, its ultimate satire, is that Beale takes the whole film just to end up back where he began, delivering a (supposedly) necessary, but unpopular and unprofitable, message to an indifferent public, with falling ratings and the specter of death hanging over him; he started out, and ended up, the pawn and victim of demands greater than audience share, first professional integrity, finally the message of pessimism and apathy dictated to him by his corporate overlords. But whereas his increasing irrelevance caused him to seek death in the beginning, it caused death to seek him in the end.
In terms of its scope, its colorfulness, its biting but humane satire, Network depicts '70s network TV the way Dickens might have. It's fascinating, but I wouldn't exactly call it enjoyable, given the bad taste it leaves in your mouth by the end—made even worse when you realize how much further things have gone in the 33 years since it was made.
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