Max Headroom

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.

Which is, unfortunately, mostly what succeeds on TV these days. Shows such as Max Headroom are just too intelligent, and go over the head of Average Joe TV Viewer (or Average Joe TV Executive). With all the proliferation and specialization of TV channels these days, maybe some day we can have an "Intelligent TV Channel" where shows like these can flourish and those too dim to "get it" can just remove it from their channel rotation.

Max Headroom was brilliant. One of the most spot-on and funny pieces of satire ever produced. The fact that it was satirizing the very medium that produced it probably had something to do with its short life, as well. I mean, when you're satirizing stupidity, obviously stupidity is going to react, just by definition.

Any TV producers out there reading this -- there's an idea for you. Create an "Intelligent TV Channel", and give us shows like this, or Key West, Brimstone, Cupid, etc. You could even call it that, as a dig at the mindless drivel that pours off the screen most of the time.

I rarely gush about TV shows, especially when they haven't been on in over a decade, but I gush about MH. This show was beyond cool, it was beyond hip, and it was far too intelligent to have been on the air in the late 80s. I was lucky enough to be able to catch MH in sindication on cable a few years ago and to validate my high opinions of the show. It was still brilliant. A few episode summaries might help to clarify:

Blank Reg (a blank is a person who has been removed from the corporate system, they have few rights, but the 'powers that be' can't easily find them) is put on trial for hacking (a major crime). The court is a gameshow with gameshow host for a judge and an opinion poll for a jury. I am glad to see how far off this is from reality - sarcasm :(

Another episode involved a sport called rake-boarding, where skateboarders would attempt to disembowel each other while performing nifty stunts. Thank god mass media has not opted for gladiatorial shows...

My question was never why this show got cancelled, but who the hell got the idea to put it on the air in the first place. I mean, this was a show whose primary entertainment value was in skewering the very medium which presented it. I can't believe that the mucky-mucks even allowed this to be seen, nevertheless broadcast.

Each show was intelligent, witty and eerily prescient. I suppose the final irony was that the show itself was cancelled, but the problems that it warned us about have come true. If you get the chance to see the extant shows, see them. They are among the only truly visionary and artistic and entertaining things to have been on stupid-box since its inception.

Doesn't hold up well at all. At times slow, other times heavy handed attempts at satire. The wannabe MTV graphics look very dated.

But when the humor hits its target, it's rewarding.

"Remember when we yelled No Future? Here we are." "A bad credit report? That's worse than murder!"

If you're not watching it for nostalgia, be prepared for long slow stretches.

Here's a piece of trivia. Max Headroom was filmed at 30 frames a second instead of the standard 24 frames a second. One of the reasons was so the series could more easily incorporate video with film, but a welcomed side-effect was that it gave the show a Hi-Def, futuristic look on 1980s television. It really did look different from any other show on TV.

What's interesting is that some current shows on video shoot at 24 or 25 frames a second to look more like film. It would be interesting to see what some filmed shows would look like in HDTV if they were shot at at 30 frames a second. You would get true HD.