A news anchor (Peter Finch) threatens to kill himself on air, but his announcement backfires when he shoots up the ratings.

On re-release for director Sidney Lumet’s 100th birthday, Network has not aged a day. In fact its scarily spot-on satire of the TV business has only grown more real with each passing reality TV-related suicide. The 1976 comedy uses the contemporary climate to forecast everything the box became, from the circus of American news shows to the dawn of reality TV itself. Inspired by the on-air suicide of a real news reporter, Paddy Chayefsky’s script takes the rise in TV violence and corporate shenanigans to its most absurd yet logical conclusion.

But like the previous year’s Nashville, the reality would probably still shock these prophetic filmmakers. The calibre of presenters on Fox News for example makes Howard Beale look dignified and coherent, his manic depression exploited by ratings-chasing TV executives and ideological corporate interests. Like the best of its genre (Life of Brian, Four Lions), Network is cut through with a compassion missing from the films of Adam McKay. The central romance in particular between the heads of news and programming (William Holden and Faye Dunaway) provides a truly emotional core, not to mention one of the all-time funniest sex scenes.

The rest of the star-studded cast are equally deserving of their Oscar sweeps. If Holden is the heart of this broadcasting beast, Robert Duvall’s hardened network exec is the head, and Finch’s apoplectic anchor the voice. Dunaway is at once hilarious and tragic as the personification of TV amorality, left totally numb to human experience in her pursuit of glowing shadows. Even at its most surreal, Lumet keeps the drama grounded in reality (again in contrast to Don’t Look Up), balancing the film on a knife edge between the believable and bizarre.

One of the great American movies, Network is a prime-time fable of TV eating itself, poignantly predicting its CNN-like rise and CNN+-like fall.