Max Headroom

Before "Revolution" ... Before "Dark Angel" ... Before "Falling Skies" and "The Walking Dead" ... There was Max.

"Max Headroom" was the first cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic TV show EVER (way back in 1987).

Max was decades ahead of its time. The show predicted such things as identity theft, the Internet, the webcam, and the fusion of media and government. (One episode even mourned the closure of movie theaters. Today, thanks to Netflix and video-on-demand, that has now come to pass.)

In a word, Max was prophetic. The hip, trendy post-apocalyptic shows that you're seeing today owe a great debt to Max Headroom.

Max Headroom was a film made especially for the UK's Channel 4 in 1984. The story is basically about an investigative journalist called Edison Carter (Matt Frewer) and his TV station Bosses. When Carter comes across a conspiracy inside his own TV station, he sets about to find the truth. In the meantime, bosses decide to remove him from the air, and replace him with a computer copy(Max). The problem is, he won't lie down and die.

It's a real 80's punk culture film. It's very dark, depressing, and for some reason a lot of it seems to take place at night or in the dark. Max lightens the mood with funny quips and puns.

Watch out for George Rossi, DC Lennox from The Bill, who plays Mahler.

as a child my brother and i used to sneak down to our cellar and watch unattendedly TV. in a "kunststuecke" (a tv series where they show movies normally not shown) we just by accident saw the original max headroom uk1995. man. it took us not even a thought to quickly make a philosophy out of it and to take this as our new expectation standard for this genre.

but boy, we never saw it again (not a single video-store holds this) and we were quite nervous when the remake (tv series) was announced ... what a disappointment! with their cold blooded commerciality they made a perfectly clean familiy movie out of the bleak retro ambiance of the original 57 min trip. worst, these are the versions the video-stores are filing.

Everyone seems to remember Max Headroom, the character and Coke pitchman, but a lot of people forget about the series Max was in. The other thing a lot of people forget is that Max in the TV screen was _not_ cgi; Max was pre-cgi, and Matt Frewer did incredibly good acting as Max. Besides that, Matt also was the lead in the series and did a lot of work as Edison Carter as well as Max.

The series didn't last nearly long enough for me; the original title, "Twenty Minutes Into the Future" is very accurate-- technologically, stylistically, and in terms of content and post-production, "Max Headroom" was ahead of its time. It was a mid-season replacement and never found its audience; the database lists the tv-movie, the series (14 or 15 eps), and the original talk show which started the whole thing. I'm still amazed at the wisdom (or lack thereof) of television execs who can cancel a series halfway through a season. Then again, "Max Headroom" was about television, making some eerily accurate predictions (CNN, tabloid talk shows), and television execs are nothing if not chickens.

Still, it would be too, too cool to see Max pop up to comment about the millennium...

Anyone who has Taped episodes, contact me. This was on FX?? When?

This was the most clever, prescient, witty, well produced, and subversive TV series ever created. I saw some of the shows, but then was expeditioning and missed many. MAX HEADROOM (the 85-86 TV series- I'm not familiar with the other permutations)was brilliant on 5 levels at once, like old Firesign Theatre skits, where one can watch again and again and see different levels each time. The money and production values were unprecedented (now each ER costs $14mil, God nows what Friends runs) in it's sly depiction of a media controlled hilarious nightmare world. Gonzo droll Matt Frewer did bang-up work as both a real TV reporter, controlled by the lush Amanda Pays via continuous links, and the sly double-entendreing computer generated Max. This was a searing critique of media run amok- everything was some brilliant trashing of some current or future trend (with Fear Factor losing me forever at the bull penis eating portion, they were prophetic). It saddens me that Frewer is trapped in lame para-psychological claptrap when he was so good in this unknown gem. Mike Hammerschlag