In 1959, John F. Kennedy wrote that TV will be “abused by demagogues, by appeals to emotion and prejudice and ignorance”. A year later, he became president thanks in part to his performances in the first ever televised presidential debates in US history. Fast forward half a century, and another US president has entered the Oval Office on the back of his TV performances. What’s more, he himself is a reality TV star. Not only is the power of television being harnessed by politicians for their own ends, but television is now seizing power of its own. In Network, the growing commodification of television and media and its debasing effects on our public discourse is explored.

The original 1976 movie, written by Paddy Chayefsky, was widely considered to be the American playwright’s magnum opus. After years of grafting as a writer in TV, the Oscar-winning screenplay was the culmination of his growing frustrations with the industry. The networks and their executives who commanded the airwaves did not care about quality programming, he thought. Only ratings.

And so after leaving TV, Chayefsky wanted to lampoon the medium he had once loved. The result was the story of news anchorman Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch in the movie and Bryan Cranston in this stage adaptation), whose rants about the vacuousness of modern society propels his network to the top of the ratings despite the vacuousness of his shtick. Critics lauded the movie for its biting satire of the excesses of the TV industry: “brilliantly, cruelly funny”; “outrageous satire”; a “messianic farce”.

But farcical it is no longer. Though Chayefsky might have predicted his movie growing obsolete with the passing of time and the decline of television, he certainly would not have foreseen the emergence of myriad new mediums which have made his script more prophetic than farcical, more prescient than satiric. Adapted for the theatre by English playwright Lee Hall (of Billy Elliott fame), Chayefsky’s lampoon of television has been updated for today’s media landscape – one where the television screen is just one of many.

Director Ivo van Hove, aided by designer Jan Versweyveld, has transformed the National Theatre stage into a modern news studio. Cameramen manoeuvring studio cameras encircle a news desk centre-stage, with a glass cube to the side housing a control booth filled with computers, servers and microphones. Studio lights hang from the ceiling, whilst four producers with headsets stand high above the action on an elevated platform like DJs above a dancefloor.

The impression of a newsroom is not merely visual and aesthetic – it’s also integral to how the story is presented. Cast members, not production staff, operate most of the newsroom equipment. The four producers overseeing all the action are actual producers, not simply background actors, who mix and produce the show in real time. All the cameras and microphones are real, projecting a live broadcast of the entire show onto a large HD screen stood centre-stage. The effect is both simple and clever: a stage production about a television news show is both theatre and television, a live show within a live show. As a result, the audience is given a difficult choice that lasts throughout the two-hour running time: one can either watch the actors in their flesh or on the big screen.

This choice is one we’re all familiar with. Every day, we’re constantly choosing between flesh or screen in restaurants, classes and even whilst walking on the street. Tristan Harris, former Design Ethicist at Google, calls this the “attention economy”: a world shaped by the competition between mega-tech companies like Facebook and Apple over the most valuable currency in the world today: our attention. Because these companies’ revenue streams are often rooted in an advertising model, they are incentivised to take up as much of our attention and time as possible with their myriad products and apps. As a result, companies have hired teams of people with the sole task of keeping our eyes on the screen, a realm of research named persuasive technology.

Beale’s breakdown leads him to rant on air that life is “bullshit” and that he’s “mad as hell!”, transgressions which alarm his friends and colleagues but pleases the network. The executives see that Beale is tapping into something the audience craves: authenticity. Beale is finally speaking his mind, albeit one that is mentally deteriorating – a far cry from the serious newsman governed by script and autocue which Beale had been all his career.

In the land of ratings, the entertaining man is king. Beale’s outbursts result in a ratings spike for the network, who respond by transforming the traditional news show into a flashy, eye-popping tabloid show. The primacy of ratings leads to the degradation of content: facts are replaced by feelings, sober analysis replaced by Beale’s rants and raves. In social media today, we have our modern-day equivalent. Algorithms which have been explicitly designed to debase our news feeds and search results populate them with divisive and outrageous content. Why? Because outrage gets us clicking and sharing; anger makes us emotional and therefore engaged.

Content and features which exploit our psychological vulnerabilities are readily deployed in this arms race for our attention. We know that features of Facebook such as its constant notifications and “Likes” system deliver dopamine hits to its users, the same chemical triggered in our brains when we have sex or take cocaine. The world’s most popular social media site is literally designed to be addictive. Sean Parker, former president of Facebook, has admitted that Facebook has been developed with the objective of “how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”

In Network, the network executives exploit their audience’s susceptibility to bouts of rage and anger, typified by Beale’s imploring of his viewers to open their windows and shout “I’m mad as hell and not going to take this anymore!” In the words of Diana Christensen, the young ambitious network exec played fantastically by Michelle Dockery (of Downton Abbey fame), “we are not in the business of morality… people want someone to articulate their rage for them”, which is exactly what Beale does. He is a prophet of the masses who says exactly what people are feeling – but not necessarily what people need to hear.

The same emotional drivel packaged beneath a façade of truth can be observed in “news” today. In the US, Fox News anchors open their shows with impassioned cries about the state of the country, whilst CNN frequently invites inane guests for the sole purpose of having them berated by other guests and their own anchors. In the UK, shows like The Pledge on Sky News and the increasingly popular radio station LBC are calibrated to generate soundbites and snippets of outrageous moments conducive to going viral. In this battle for clicks, likes and shares, theatres of constructed authenticity and conflict have replaced sober and serious news operations.

Paraphrasing comedian Hasan Minhaj, watching news today is like watching people watch the news. Viewers are encouraged by the networks to tweet them their thoughts on the latest hot-button issues. Focus groups and audience participation have replaced the traditional one-way interaction that marked how news used to be disseminated. The problem is that viewers today don’t just want information and facts told to them – they also want to see how others react to these facts and in doing so, show themselves how they should react.

We see this trend elsewhere in people’s media diets. Youtube is filled with “reaction videos” which garner millions of views. Hugely popular shows like Gogglebox here in the UK has the basic premise of watching others watch television. In Network, this somewhat surreal desire to watch others watch things (a kind of meta-entertainment) is embodied by an on-stage restaurant occupying one side of the stage with a working kitchen where audience members dine on five-courses as the play unfolds. The cast moves in and around the diners throughout the production. They watch them, whilst the rest of the audience watch them watch.

In effect, van Hove and his team have created a microcosm of the attention economy in their elaborate staging of Chayefsky’s plot. The audience’s experience in the theatre is deliberately made difficult as different stimuli constantly vie for our attention. From the live broadcast on the HD screen to the on-stage diner picking his nose to the actual actors themselves, our eyes are pulled every which way and never given a rest – the same thing our multitude of phones, apps and screens do to us every day. Though some have criticised the restaurant for being a way to charge exorbitant ticket prices, what they don’t see is just how appropriate this is for a production that critiques the commercialisation of media.

The production achieves its goals of integrating us into the plot and fragmenting our attention so well that Beale’s final monologue, where he steps off the stage and delivers it from a seat amongst the patrons, feels seamless, almost expected. The cameras turn so that audience members appear on the screen for the first time, but the truth is that we’ve been part of the production the entire time, whether it be as on-stage diners or as the embodiment of Beale’s mobilised masses. Beale doesn’t break the fourth wall when he directly addresses us, inasmuch as there was never one to begin with.

Our attention has always been the grand prize. The dominant medium might have changed, the devices slimmed and the screens shrunk, but the perverse misalignment of incentives between content producers and consumers remain the same. Everything these companies do today is done to hoard more of our time and attention, whether it be Netflix’s auto-play feature, Youtube’s conspiracy-promoting algorithms or Facebook’s infinite newsfeeds. For university students like me, for whom procrastination is almost a disease, there is consolation – meagre as it is – that I’m up against dozens of people in every major tech company for whom my procrastination is a metric of their success.

“We are not dealing with a human institution,” Chayefsky himself wrote in a script note. “We are dealing with an enormous profit-making machine”.

***

At the National Theatre, London, until 24 March. Sold out but Friday Rush tickets available. Box office: 020-7452 3000.