XPost: alt.tv.max-headroom, rec.arts.sf.tv, rec.arts.tv   
   From: arthur@alum.calberkeley.org   
      
   On 1/27/2020 12:25 PM, christopherl bennett wrote:   
   > I recently rented the DVD set of the 1987 Max Headroom TV series from   
   > Netflix.   
      
   I bought the DVD set when it was released 10 years ago, but never got   
   around to watching it.  I guess I haven't watched the series since it   
   originally aired in the 80s.   
      
   This is a show I watched in its first run, and I remembered being   
   > rather fond of it, finding it innovative and enjoyable and regretting that it   
   > was cancelled after only 13 episodes (out of 14 that were made).   
      
   Same.   
      
     And it’s   
   > certainly been acclaimed in the years since for its innovation.  It was a   
   > cyberpunk show just a few years after the term “cyberpunk” was coined   
   — just   
   > about the only case I know of where a television show was right on the cusp   
   > of a new science-fictional development rather than lagging a decade or two   
   > behind prose SF.  It was prophetic in predicting broadcasting trends like a   
   > proliferation of hundreds of channels, the 24-hour news cycle, the existence   
   > of a global computer/entertainment network dominating people’s lives, and   
   the   
   > manipulation of the news by corporations.  And it was daring for being a   
   > network television show whose whole raison d’etre was to satirize and   
   > critique television networks.  Not to mention that it essentially launched   
   > the career of genre stalwart Matt Frewer, who played the heroic journalist   
   > Edison Carter and his computer-generated alter ego, Max Headroom.   
   >   
   > (For those who aren’t in the know, in real life, Max Headroom was created   
   as   
   > a novel kind of host for a British music-video show.  The idea was to use   
   > something completely computer-generated rather than the usual human hosts, a   
   > literal “talking head.”  They didn’t have the CGI technology to pull   
   that off   
   > for real, so they put Matt Frewer in prosthetic makeup simulating the slick,   
   > angular look of ’80s computer graphics and used editing tricks to make him   
   > jerk and stu-stu-stutter so he’d appear artificial.   
      
   I had *no* idea!  I knew Matt Frewer voiced the character, but I always   
   thought it actually was primitive CGI.   
      
     In order to explain this   
   > host character, they developed a pilot film set in a Blade Runner/Brazil-   
   > inspired future in which investigative journalist Edison Carter was injured   
   > in pursuit of a story and had his mind scanned and copied into a computer in   
   > order to find out what he knew, creating Max, a duplicate of Edison’s mind   
   > that was a little bit off and had a far more eccentric personality, as a   
   > result of having the entirety of the world’s TV content pouring through his   
   > mind, or some such thing.  Basically he was a distillation of all TV, a   
   > pastiche of slick TV pitchmen, simultaneously a child of and a critic of pop   
   > culture.  ABC executives saw the pilot and bought it as a US series, remaking   
   > the pilot and recasting everyone except leads Frewer and Amanda Pays and   
   > supporting player William Morgan Sheppard.  Although Max was far more   
   > successful as a music video/talk-show host and Coca-Cola pitchman.)   
   >   
   > On seeing the show again after nearly a quarter-century, though, I find it   
   > hasn’t aged well.  It wasn’t as impressive as I remembered.  The writing   
   is   
   > often sloppy.  In the pilot, teen genius Bryce Lynch (Chris Young), Max’s   
   > creator, spends much of the episode trying to kill Edison on orders from his   
   > sleazy boss, which is what leads to Max’s creation in the first place.  And   
   > yet when Edison meets him later in the episode, this kid who was   
   > sociopathically chuckling during his attempted murder of Edison mere minutes   
   > before suddenly says “I’m glad you didn’t die,” and for the rest of   
   the   
   > series, Bryce is Edison’s ally and tech support.   
      
   That character switch does sound vaguely familiar.   
      
   Sure, he was occasionally   
   > portrayed as amoral — a blatant example of the fictional stereotype of the   
   > genius who’s a walking computer with no human feeling — but the total   
   lack of   
   > any consequences or even acknowledgment of his attempted homicide is very   
   > awkward.   
   >   
   > A lot about the show is very broad — the satire, the cartoony portrayal of   
   > Max — and in hindsight it feels fairly crude.   The portrayal of the   
   > logistics of Edison’s job was awkward — it’s hard to believe that he   
   could   
   > just cut into any other programming with a “live and direct” story, or   
   that   
   > he’d so often go on the air without yet having a full picture of what he   
   was   
   > reporting on (although, admittedly, that doesn’t stop a lot of modern   
   > telejournalists).  And sometimes the writing is stilted in ways that you can   
   > tell are the result of network executives having no faith in the intelligence   
   > of the viewer.  For instance, in one episode, the police enter a suspect’s   
   > home and discover that she had an off switch on her television.  The cops   
   > react in shock to the fact, and one of them says “She’ll get twenty   
   years for   
   > that.”  Any conscious viewer would understand at this point that in the   
   world   
   > of Max Headroom, it’s illegal to have an off switch on your TV.  And yet we   
   > then cut to another angle and hear the off-camera cop’s voiceover adding,   
   > “Off switches are illegal!”  As if the other cops he was talking to   
   didn’t   
   > already know that.  Granted, that’s an instance of the show being held back   
   > by its network, but there’s enough about the show’s own writing that   
   doesn’t   
   > work as well as it could.   
   >   
   > In particular, for a show called Max Headroom, it isn’t generally about Max   
   > Headroom.  It would’ve been more accurate to call it Edison Carter.  Sure,   
   > there are episodes where they manage to make good use of Max as a character   
   > or a concept — either someone wants to obtain Max’s unique technology for   
   > some reason, or Max is the only one who can get into a bad guy’s system, or   
   > Max is needed as a distraction.  There’s one particularly good episode,   
   > “Neurostim,” in which Edison’s relationship with Max has become   
   strained but   
   > Max is the only one who can save him from an addictive VR product, so they   
   > have to have a meeting of minds and hash out their conflict (although it kind   
   > of fizzles out at the end).  But there are too many other episodes where Max   
   > contributes nothing to the story beyond popping into a scene and making   
   > wisecracks or pithy observations about the story’s events.  Sometimes his   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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