These days when someone is fired from a job, HR escorts them out of the building immediately and the fired employee is typically not allowed to re-enter the building. But UBS apparently is going to permit Howard Beale to continue doing his job until the clock runs out.

So he’s back in the newsroom the next day going through his normal routine, as is everyone else. They hold a new meeting, going over that day’s stories. Howard goes to makeup. He comes out to the anchor desk. A stage worker asks him how he’s doing and he responds “I’m still alive.”

The scene now goes to the control room. We see one employee sitting in the back of the room talking to his secretary about her personal life. He asks her how she keeps getting involved with married men. Such a question would be out of bounds in today’s workplace as well. Contemporary viewers will find the next line even less social acceptable. The newscast’s director hears the talk about the colleague, an attractive woman, probably in her mid to late 20s, turns towards her and chimes in: why look on the outside for married men, why not me?

If you think “Network” is being satirical about this, you can look no further than a more serious film of the era—“All the President’s Men—for validation. In this highly solemn re-telling of the Watergate investigation featuring Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, there’s a subplot where the reporters ask a colleague if she is still dating an employee of President Nixon’s “Committee to Re-Elect the President” (also known as CREEP.)

The colleague says no, she just broke up with him. Woodward and Bernstein then coax her to reconnect with this man so she could acquire a list of CREEP employees. While Woodward tells her to forget about the request and apologizes for making it, in the next scene we see her dropping off the list of employees on his desk—the assumption being that she reconnected with (and possibly slept with) her old boyfriend to acquire the list.

What’s clear from the cinema of the early 1970s is that the culture was integrating women into the workplace, but the sexual politics of the old, dying era was still dominant. In “Network,” the sexual joke was made by a man with power making a deniable pass at a coworker. In “All the President’s Men,” the supposed good guys of the story were so driven by journalistic ambition that they would sacrifice the values of a colleague to get what they wanted.

Back in the control room, we see Howard Beale continuing the newscast. Howard Beale announces that he will be leaving the network in two weeks because of poor ratings. At this moment, a man next to the director asks him what he said to their coworker. The two men start laughing. We also see that the side conversation in the back of the room continues.

All of this is going on while Howard Beale decides to announce on the air that on his final broadcast, he’s going to kill himself, blow his brains out right on the air. The control room, distracted by their jokes and soap operas, don’t even hear Beale say this.

But when they cut to commercial, everyone freaks out. People bark questions and orders at Beale. No one bothers to ask him how he’s doing or to offer any direct help or support, they just vent anger at him. While our culture can still do more to fight the stigma of mental health distress, we have no doubt made progress since the early 1970s. In companies confronted with situation like this today—whether the outburst came on the air or in a meeting—the response would be more compassionate, partially for legal reasons.

The decision is made to take him off the air immediately. This leads to stage hands physically trying to remove him from the desk, but not before the camera briefly goes live, showing Beale struggling with them. A “technical difficulties” screen is inserted soon afterwards.

This will be a theme throughout “Network”—characters acting as if the entire world revolved around their concerns, no one all that interested in the world around them or their fellow human beings. Tom Wolfe labeled people of this era the “Me Generation” for good reason.