A Look Back At Max Headroom

After I finished up edits and rewrites on the second draft of my third novel and reviewed edits on my second novel, my thoughts turned to ideas for future books.

See, folks, this is what happens when you become a novel writer -- you keep getting all these ideas in your head for new stories!

But I'm not here to talk to you about such ideas, because my thoughts also turned to my collection of DVDs that I've accumulated through the years, how I started to think more critically about the movies and TV shows and what they were all about, and that's when I pulled out my DVDs of the Max Headroom TV series.

For those who remember Max Headroom, you probably remember him from MTV and his ad spots plugging New Coke, but what caught my interest when I was younger was the short-lived TV series based on the character. It lasted 13 episodes on ABC (a 14th episode was produced but didn't air until it went into reruns on cable networks) and was released on DVD by Shout Factory seven years ago.

What sparked my interest in revisiting the TV series was its commentary on television and its impact on society. Set in a dystopian future (the tag line was "twenty minutes into the future"), it focused on a society in which multiple TV networks dominate and everything revolves around their programming. Edison Carter is a reporter for Network 23 who always want to seek out the truth, even if it means clashing with his network's agenda.

In his pursuit of a story regarding something amiss at his own network, he is injured and his memories are download into a computerized conscious dubbed Max Headroom (so named because the last thing Carter saw before his injury was a sign that read "Max Headroom"). Unlike Carter, his computerized alter ego is brash and outspoken, but like Carter, has plenty of reasons to be critical of the TV-dominated society he's part of.

The show creators and writers admitted that Max Headroom was a series ahead of its time, given the relevancy that its criticisms of television and media hold today. The series predicted the rise of TV networks dominating the landscape, but while it didn't predict the rise of Internet-based media, Max Headroom would certainly have fit in well with today's society in which just about any form of media can make somebody an instant celebrity.

What I am going to do for the next few weeks is critique each of the 14 episodes and discuss some of the themes explored in each episode. The format I'm going with will look like this:

* Episode Name
* Premise
* Theme explored
* Max Headroom quotes
* Personal observations

I thought it would be fun to go back and review a series that, while it didn't last long, it had a big impact on a number of writers today and would probably be a relevant series to bring back to the airwaves today.

And who knows -- maybe it'll inspire some of you science fiction, fantasy and dystopian writers to come up with some of your own ideas about what might happen "twenty minutes into the future."

Links to episode reviews:
Episode 1 - Blipverts
Episode 2 - Raking
Episode 3 - Body Banks
Episode 4 - Security Systems
Episode 5 - War
Episode 6 - The Blanks
Episode 7 - The Academy
Episode 8 - Deities
Episode 9 - Grossberg's Return
Episode 10 - Dream Thieves
Episode 11 - Whackets
Episode 12 - Neurostim
Episode 13 - Lessons
Episode 14 - Baby Gro Bags