Max Headroom

Max Headroom debuted on September 18, 1987 and it ended on May 12, 1988 after one season and 14 episodes. The series starred Matt Frewer as Edison Carter, Amanda Pays as Theora Jones, Jeffrey Tambour as Murray, and Chris Young as Bryce Lynch. The series is set in a dystopic future in which an oligarchy of television networks controls the world. The series originally aired on ABC in the U.S. and was based on the British TV film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, which aired on Channel 4. The main character hit the mainstream in a series of New Coke commercials and Garry Trudeau used it in Doonesbury. Max Headroom is available on DVD. It is not currently streaming.

It is difficult to understand how Max Headroom completely changed the way I viewed art, and especially how it did it in 1996 or so. It did, though, and in a way that is suitable for sharing as an article. Boston, the first day of the most significant snow of the year. It was the second of them, a storm that I remember going on for three days. I knew it was the second because we always played football on the day of the first snow, and I specifically remember being uninjured, so we must not have played. I was, in fact, on the couch in the common room of our suite, my socked feet up, covered in a bedspread with the faces of the New Kids on the Block on it. We had a TV and a VCR, though no cable or antenna, which meant we could only watch what we either rented from VideoSmith, or had brought with us from home. And we all had VHS collections. I had ordered Chinese for five, my suitemate, Omar, had ordered a large pizza, pepperoni and sausage (and New York Pizza knew that as our regular), and my buddy John had gone out to Star Market and stocked up our mini-kitchen with microwavable stuff.

We wouldn’t have to go down to the dining hall if we didn’t want to, and since it was somewhere around 11pm, we couldn’t have anyhow. I wanted to get something to watch, having just watched Twin Peaks one storm prior, and X-Files still being on the air. My roommate Matt came into the common room, said nothing, but popped a tape into the VCR, plopped down at the end of the couch closest to the TV and three inches from my feet, and hit play on the remote. It was a Max Headroom Coke commercial, and after a bit, the catchphrase— “Catch the wave, COKE!” And the rest of the suite filed in. Omar grabbed one chair, wearing his bathrobe and slippers. John from his room, pulling up space on the floor. Trumble walking in, as if timed by some sitcom director, grabbing one of the stools from the bar on the opposite side of the mini-kitchen bar, and pulling it into the edge of the living room. A harsh edit, as all home edits were, and then the first episode of Max Headroom began. Now, I need to explain my college. Emerson College was basically a communications college where everyone wanted to be something they weren’t able to study. A lot of musicians studying radio or creative writing. Actors studying speech pathology. An historian studying poetry and children’s writing because he could get in to Emerson, but not to one of the colleges that had actually important history programs. That last one might have been just me. Anyhoo, there are few places, even to today I’m told, that really get the impact of television on the masses, and how new media plays a role in defining what will become banal within our own lifetimes. This idea was hammered into us in all out required MassComm classes. It was there that I was first introduced to post-modernism as a theory and realized that it had always been what I enjoyed in film and paintings. I had watched Max Headroom on its original airing, and I loved it. Part of it was the way that it presented television, and how dark it was. Plus, it had a cast I loved—Matt Frewer, George Coe, Jeffrey Tambor, and perhaps most importantly, Charlie Rocket. These folks grabbed my attention, but honestly, at 13, I wasn’t looking very deeply. In the common room, with more food than we should have been eating between 11pm and 10am, we watched episode after episode after episode. It only took a few minutes to realize that though the show was nearly 10 years old, it was talking about 1996. The idea of Blipverts, ads that run high-speed and can overload people’s nervous systems, was coming and coming fast. Edison Carter, an intrepid reporter looking into the case, gets in an accident, running into a cross-bar in a garage that reads “Max. Headroom” and a brainscan leads him to form as a computer network construct calling himself Max Headroom. That might have been a bit far afield for 1996, but we were seeing miracles every day in genetics and research, and networks. It all felt like it was now. In the first run, it all felt like it was the inevitable later. We were right…sort of. We were in the very first years of the internet in 1996. We all knew a lot about what was happening commercially, and a couple of us knew what was going on with deeper research through the copies of WIRED that someone must have subscribed to and left around the suite. Max Headroom was talking about advertising in a way that wasn’t frequent yet, but we could all tell was coming. The folks who wrote Max Headroom saw it coming, too. Moreover, they understood the implications. There was an episode that talked about reality TV, not yet called that, but we also knew these, too. Real People, American Gladiators, That’s Incredible, and on and on. We saw what these were, and seeing it put on the screen like it was hit me hard. Max Headroom wasn’t doing a predictive story, but was taking what was already out there and showing it to us with a nice polish. On that was hung, like so many Christmas bulbs, things like the banning of off-buttons, and that made it science fiction. But this was commentary on where we were, and I never noticed it when I was a kid. I noticed it in 1996, under my New Kids bedspread, the snow out the window behind the TV falling in flakes the size of small children. Ideas of dream recording, something scientists are actively working on now but was a feature in an early WIRED, were bouncing around with the idea of the Vu Age Church, which is 100% like the cults that have popped up in Marin, Napa, and Santa Cruz counties over the last couple of decades. It would be an interesting thought to look at how that cult and Heaven’s Gate used similar messaging, though they would have been active at the time of writing the episode.

But what hit me, beneath that blanket, tummy full of General Tso’s and pizza and microwave popcorn and ramen noodles and Doritos, was that it was telling us what we already knew—the media is dangerous, but you have to take it in; you honestly can’t avoid it. If you boiled Max Headroom down, the idea seems to be Welcome to the Valley of Death—Enjoy Your Walk. And as we finished the last episode, followed by a few segments from the UK Max Headroom 20 Minutes into the Future, we headed down to the dining hall, to breakfast, for me always toast with bacon and Coke. We talked, going back and forth over what we had spent the entire evening “watching” as truth be told, most of us fell asleep for at least an hour in the common room. “You know what gets me?” I asked. “What?” Omar responded. “I think this is what all those paintings in the abstract room at the MFA are about.” Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. “Whaddya mean?” “It’s about how what we create art, and tell ourselves it’s art, but really, we’re just putting together distractions, and we hope that those distractions catch people up enough that they fall in deep, and the deeper they fall, the more they give over, and the more they give over, the less likely they are to notice that they’re being manipulated and drained. ” Silence. “So…we’re creating the instruments of our own downfall every time we try to make any sort of art?” John said, his face showing the maybe 45 minutes of sleep the night before. “No,” I said, “I think it’s saying we can’t help but try to make our mark, even if we’re gonna take folks down with us.” “Bleak,” said Matt. Silence again. “OK,” Omar said “I’m getting more bacon.” “Grab me some orange juice?” I called after him. And we never spoke of it again.