The Max Headroom character started in 1985 as an announcer for a music video program on British television Channel 4 called "The Max Talking Headroom Show". The intent was to portray a hip, cutting-edge character that was a computer-generated person. To create a background story for their announcer, Channel 4 created a one-hour TV movie describing the story of the creation of the computer-generated person.
Titled 20 minutes into the future, the movie was a dystopic look at a run-down near-future dominated by television and large corporations. It introduced television reporter [Edison Carter]? and his efforts to expose corruption and greed. In the pilot episode, Edison is hunted down by his own employer, [Network 23]?. In the process, he is injured and his mind is digitized into a computer program. The resulting program takes on a life of its own as the eccentric and unpredictable "Max Headroom" who can move through the computer and television networks at will.
In 1987, the story was turned into a full TV series. The original one-hour movie was partially recast and refilmed as a pilot for a new series on American television's [ABC network]?. It was the first and possibly the only cyberpunk TV series to run in the United States on one of the main broadcast networks in [prime time]?.
The Max Headroom character was distinctive. Appearing as simply a head on TV, he was most well known for his jerky techno-stuttering speech, sharp wit, and a knack for dark puns (such as "With friends like that, who needs enemas?").
Max became something of a celebrity outside of the television series. Max was the spokesman for Coca-Cola's New Coke campaign, using his hallmark stacatto to deliver the slogan "Catch the wave! Coke!". He also hosted an interview show on the Cinemax cable TV channel, and appeared in the video for "Paranoimia" by [The Art of Noise]?.
Like other science fiction, the series introduced the general public to new ideas in the form of cyberpunk themes and social issues. Before the Internet brought personal privacy into general public scrutiny, Max Headroom portrayed the Blanks, a counter-culture group of people who lived without any official numbers or documentation for the sake of privacy. Various epsiodes delved into issues like literacy and the lack thereof in a TV-dominated culture (Blank Reg: "It's a book. Non-volatile storage media. Everyone should have one.")
Although it was not a comedy series, low-key dark humor was a noteworthy part of the entire effect. Some was more overt, such as Max's wisecracking lines, while other was less obvious. One example is the use of traffic signs for character names. The character Max Headroom got his name because, in the pilot episode, Edison Carter crashed into a traffic gate labelled "Max headroom 2 meters" and was knocked unconscious, and when his brain was digitized that of course was his last image. Better yet, the president of Network 23's largest corporate sponsor from Asia, the Zik-Zak corporation, is named Ped Xing. It could be a Chinese name, but it is also the common American traffic sign abbreviation for "pedestrian crossing".
Technological anachronisms were a recurring feature in the series, reminding one of perhaps Terry Gilliam's movies Brazil or Twelve Monkeys. As Theora types in computer commands for real-time control of satellites, the camera zooms in to show her typing on the keys of a manual typewriter. Max himself, of course, was the ultimate. While the story line says he is computer generated, the technology did not exist in the mid 1980's to make it possible (or at least practical). Max was actually actor Matt Frewer in latex and foam-rubber prosthetic makeup. With some rotating line backgrounds and simple video editing, the average person was convinced that Max really was computer generated.
In the end, the series all-too-accurately predicted its own demise. With story lines about TV ratings monitored on a second-by-second basis, the series was a little too far ahead of its time. After 14 episodes, ABC cancelled it.
Like most fads, Max faded from the public eye in the 1990s. He was mostly forgotten until the late 1990s, when U.S. cable TV channels Bravo and the Sci-Fi Channel re-ran the series.
In 1997, life unfortunately imitated art as first predicted by Max Headroom. In the original story, reporter Edison Carter exposed the TV network's efforts to create Blipverts, a new high-intensity television commercial which had the unfortunate side-effect of overloading the nervous system of certain viewers (with lethal consequences). In a bizarre parallel in 1997, Japan's overwhelmingly-popular Pocket Monster or Pokemon television series unintentionally triggered seizures in hundreds of viewers through intense flashing images on the screen. While fortunately not lethal, the relatively rare condition of photosensitive epilepsy? caused these epileptic seizures in the affected viewers because of their intense concentration on the flashing images. This event was later spoofed on The Simpsons as a TV series called "Galactic Seizure Robots".
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