Critically and commercially successful on release, it won Academy Awards for Best Screenplay, Best Actor for Peter Finch, Best Actress for Faye Dunaway and Best Supporting Actress for Beatrice Straight as well as was nominated for 6 others awards including Best Picture and Best Director.

#64 in The American Film Institute’s 2007 list of 100 Greatest American Films of All Time.

In 2005, the two Writers Guilds of America voted Paddy Chayefsky’s script one of the 10 greatest screenplays in the history of cinema.

In 2002, the film was inducted into the Producers Guild of America Hall of Fame as a film that has “set an enduring standard for American entertainment.”

Network was one of the major hits of 1976-77 and it received largely positive reviews for its direction, story, script and performances with Vincent Canby of the The New York Times calling it “outrageous… brilliantly, cruelly funny, a topical American comedy that confirms Chayefsky’s position as a major new American satirist” while Roger Ebert went on include it in his list of Great Movies and to view the film’s commentary on American TV & Media to be ”like prophecy”.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin wrote that “no predictor of the future – not even Orwell – has ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote Network.”

Today, the film is rated on Rotten Tomatoes at 92% with the site’s critics consensus stating “Driven by populist fury and elevated by strong direction, powerful acting, and an intelligent script, Network’s searing satire of ratings-driven news remains sadly relevant more than four decades later.”