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| The America of the future... where TV is a right, but housing is a privilege. |
While it may have faded from our
pop-cultural consciousness into little more than a strange,
half-remembered curiosity of the mid-1980s, the short-lived TV series
Max Headroom holds up
incredibly well as not only one of the better pieces of American
cyberpunk media, but one of the most prescient and ahead-of-its time.
Before the titular character told viewers to “c-c-c-catch
the wave” of New Coke in a disastrously ill-advised marketing
campaign, the show which spawned him was one of the first mainstream
pieces of pop-culture to ride the wave of the sci-fi movement started
by the cult popularity of Blade Runner and
William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Despite being forever tied in the minds of many to a massive
commercial ad campaign, Max Headroom
is a remarkably subversive series, and an extremely clever postmodern
one. If ever there was a 1980s TV show in dire need of rediscovery
and reappraisal, this is it. Max Headroom is
the TV show that 2017 needs: a prime slice of '80s sci-fi which cuts
its neon-and-synth nostalgia with remarkably relevant social
commentary about the toxicity of constant media exposure, reality TV,
fake-news, and social media nearly 30 years before any of those were
things that existed. This is one of those social commentaries that
may have seemed like over-the-top satire in its day, but has aged
into an almost ridiculously spot-on critique of our troubled current
media landscape.
The
dystopian future of Max Headroom is
one in which TV networks and fast-food chains have partnered to own
literally everything, including the government, whose elections are
staged based on ratings. Ratings wars have enough sabotage and murder
that they are almost actual wars, it is illegal to turn off your TV,
reality television is the only television, and all humans are
required to register their data into a massive social network that
keeps track of everyone at all times. Corporate profiteers are living
large in skyscrapers and the poor starve in the slums, while piles of
TVs continue to feed them a constant flow of media. Disconnecting
from the social network has become an underground resistance of
people who call themselves Blanks. In the midst of this reality, at
the massively popular Network 23, one of the last teams of honest
reporters – Edison Carter (Matt Frewer), Theora (Amanda Pays), and
Murray (Jeffrey Tambor) – try to subvert the techno-fascism raging
around them by actually bringing their viewers the truth. But to do
so is a dangerous struggle, against both Network 23 management and
the power-mad external forces of this dystopian world; a struggle
which almost kills Edison, and leads to the creation of his
ghost-in-the-machine, psychic-imprint-as-self-aware-computer-program
doppelganger, Max Headroom. Matt Frewer is excellent in a double-role
as the intrepid, dryly witty Edison and the snarky, scenery-chewing,
over-the-top Max. The whole ensemble is pretty strong – Jeffrey
Tambor is, not surprisingly, particularly
good – but this is Frewer's show, and his career-making performance
perfectly balances the writing's combination of serious sci-fi and
wild satire. Over two half-seasons (it was a mid-season replacement
its first year, and got canceled in the middle of its second) Edison, Max, and their allies navigate the odd corners of this
William-Gibson-meets-Terry-Gilliam dystopia, in a series of episodes
which offer biting satire of mass media and increasingly
tech-dependent human existence.
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| Co-starring Jeffrey Tambor as Dr. Phil |
Examining
the show in 2017, the dystopia described above should have some very
familiar-sounding elements: pervasive reality TV, media overrunning
government and turning it into a farce that is dangerous for
democracy, unplugging from media feeling like a revolutionary act.
All of these things were satirical exaggerations of things already
starting to happen in the 1980s media landscape, but it is almost
eerie how much more accurate the social commentary feels today. Even
specific episode plots feel creepily plausible in 2017. The pilot
episode sees the network go to the logical conclusion of the constant
desire to cram more ads into less time by creating subliminal-message
advertizing; the downside of which is that the “blipverts” make
some viewers' heads explode (though not a statistically high enough
number for them to want to pull the ads). Another episode sees a
buffoonish corporate figurehead run for political office on a
platform of fear of the Other (in this case, Blanks), and carefully
tool his incendiary messaging based on ratings figures. One might
expect an '80s TV show about media to be dated 30 years later, but
most of it still really works; the team behind the show had their
finger on the cultural pulse even more than they likely knew.
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| The future - where all the walls have atmospheric blue backlights. |
In
addition to its memorable use of anachronisms, the art and sound
design of Max Headroom
present cyberpunk at its best. Its dystopian cityscapes are moody
film-noir-style worlds full of deep blue light contrasted by bright
neon, and its interiors contain messes of technology that look as
though Terry Gilliam visualized scenes from Neuromancer.
Its soundtrack consists of alternately droning or rock-infused synth
tracks that sound inspired by early Gary Numan.
In general this show looks and sounds really good for television of
its day: its highly artificial and stylized look is very cinematic,
and can't have been cheap. It totally nails the cyberpunk look on the
small-screen nearly as definitively as Blade Runner
nailed it on the big-screen.
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| Can't you just hear the Vangelis playing when you look at this skyline? |
That
high-budget look is one of several reasons why it is, in a way,
shocking that this show was made at all. ABC really took
a gamble on it, artistically as well as financially: its particular
satirical blend of sci-fi is pretty niche, its direct pop-cultural
antecedents – Blade Runner and
Neuromancer –
were sleeper hits that built up steam and became classics, and not
immediate blockbusters, and the whole show is way more bizarre than
just about any other major-network series short of Twin
Peaks.
But most of all, it's hard to believe that ABC greenlit a show with
such a subversive view of media. This is a series that finds its
dystopian future in the increasingly inescapable expansion of media
empires, and TV network executives are quite literally its
world-devouring villains. The series seems to have barely-concealed
contempt for its own corporate overlords, and it bit the hand the fed
it almost constantly. In the end, this is probably what killed the
show: it wasn't canceled because it wasn't doing well, so much as it
was murdered. It endured the same fate suffered by Firefly
a
decade and a half later: it was doing respectably though not
spectacularly, but there were those in network management who wanted
it dead, and they continually shuffled its time slot and pulled its
advertising, making it very hard for fans to keep watching, until
they had created a situation in which they could cancel it ostensibly
for poor ratings. It's pretty clear what actually happened, though:
it was just too weird and subversive to exist in the network era.
All of
this sounds like a perfect recipe for a beloved cult classic, yet
somehow the series itself has more or less been forgotten, with only
the ephemeral image of the Max Headroom character remaining clearly
in our consciousness. If this is the time when Max Headroom
should be enjoying a cult
comeback, why hasn't it yet? The answer likely lies in how the
decades after its release were rather cruel to the show: it never got
a home video release in America for the first more-than-20-years of
its life, and after the Sci-Fi Channel (before it was SyFy) and Tech
TV stopped rerunning it in the early-2000s it became completely
unavailable for the better part of a decade. This was when it largely
slipped through the cracks of our collective memory. Shout! Factory
finally gave it a complete-series DVD release in 2010, but that was a
few years before '80s nostalgia was really in full-swing; if they
released a new special edition box set today its popularity would
surely skyrocket, but seven years ago it came out on disc without
anyone besides hardcore sci-fi fans really noticing. Still, as some
already fear that we are moving into a techno-dystopia of our own,
this is the perfect time to rediscover this overlooked gem to the
genre's past. While it delivers plenty of '80s nostalgia and kitsch,
Max Headroom is so
much more. It may not often get mentioned in the same breath as Blade
Runner and Neuromancer,
but this series stands as one of the better pieces of cyberpunk
fiction that followed the success of those two genre-starters, not to
mention one of the few that seriously crossed over into the
mainstream. In fact William Gibson was signed on to write a script
for the show's second season before it ultimately got canceled; if
any proof is needed of the series' cyberpunk cred, surely that is it.
C-c-c-catch the wave, and pick up Shout! Factory's DVD set. I'm just
as excited for the new Blade
Runner
as anyone else, but a big part of me thinks that what we really need
this year is a revival of Max
Headroom.
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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