Max Headroom

Max Headroom (TV Series)
Warner Brothers, 1987

Genre: Television Series, Science Fiction, Comedy


Honors:

• 2 Emmy wins and 1 nomination (1987)
• International Monitor Awards (1988)

Review: In a depressing look into the future of civilization, the world of news and television controls the population. In the pilot for the series, one reporter for a leading news corporation, Edison Carter, gets on the bad side of his corporate supervisors when he goes against his boss to investigate a murder caused by "Blipverts," a condensed series of advertisements designed to prevent viewers from channel flipping that has a deadly side effect for some viewers. When Carter gets too close to the truth, the head of his organization sets out to have him taken out of the picture. After Carter is injured and held captive, his boss' young genius inventor attempts to download Carter's memories and create a digital version of Carter inside the news network's main computer. Carter's computer persona takes on a life or its own, naming itself "Max Headroom" and escaping into the system, broadcasting himself live across the nation. While his appearance (and network ratings) resemble Carter, Max Headroom is a prankster with a satirical sense of humor and a desire to publicly embarrass his creators.

Opinion: I decided to give this show a view since it loosely fit the description of a dystopian series, and I was interested in getting an idea of what a tv show with dystopic qualities would look like (aside from the series Firefly, the only other dystopian series I have seen). There is some definite potential for this series to be interesting for a tween--namely, one of the smartest, goofiest characters in the series is the young prodigy and primary inventor for Network 23, Bryce. I laughed a lot watching the pilot episode, but most of my laughter was sympathetic as I understood that the portrayal of technological advancements in 1987's version of the future were extremely outdated, and I'm pretty sure tweens today would recognize how unrealistic the gadgets and networking capabilities used in the show seem to be now that we are experiencing some of these ideas in the present and they do not exactly mirror those in Max Headroom.

Ideas: I think this show would make for a good comparing and contrasting exercise. One can look at the ideas in Max Headroom, the projections of the future being offered, and compare them to the "future" that has come to be since the 1980s. In many ways this show, like many futuristic movies, attempts to identify what we are capable of progressing into, both for better and for worse, and it gives inspiration to inventors by offering them something to work towards.