The low-budget, but beautifully-directed & darkly brilliant British telemovie "Max Headroom: 20 minutes Into The Future" (1985) introduced the stuttering, arrogant, wisecracking artificial intelligence CGI character Max Headroom, and told us how he was created from the brain of roving reporter Edison Carter. The character of Max Headroom himself had a fairly brief role in that movie in a relatively minor sub-plot, but the key point was that he found himself in the hands of a pirate TV station, where he was given his own show and helped boost their ratings.
The spin off British TV series "The Max Headroom Show" (1985) was then ostensibly Max's show on the pirate TV station. It was basically a series of half-hour music video programs with comic monologues and celebrity interviews by Max linking the music videos, although it is probably more accurate to say that it was a series of comic monologues and celebrity interviews cheaply padded out with music videos.
I was entranced by this series as a young teenager, even before I saw the original movie which made sense of how the character came to exist, and why he behaved as he did. It's probably fair to say it had a substantial cult following among younger people. I suppose I was captivated by the novelty of what I thought was a fully computerised character, even though in reality it was just digitally processed footage of an actor talking to camera. With the benefit of hindsight, I now realise Max's character was stolen from Bob Hope, and for the most part he was just as unfunny. Once the novelty of Max Headroom himself wore off, "The Max Headroom Show" had little to recommend it above any other music video program, other than the non-blandness & verbal barbs of the host. I seem to recall that the reason given for the program's termination wasn't poor ratings, but the sheer expense of frame-by-frame image processing in the mid-1980's.
The first episode of the 1987 American TV series largely copied the original "Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future", but wasn't as well-acted or directed, and lacked the dystopian darkness & high production standards of the original. The ending is also a bit different, in order to set up the subsequent episodes. These are essentially satirical dramas based around the Headroom-assisted investigations of roving reporter Edison Carter. I only watched a couple of episodes, as it was watered down compared to the original and lacked the bite. It also missed the point of the 1985 original, which was to set up the music video program that gave us lots of Max, whose personality was the British series' raison d'etre.
None of my criticisms diminish the original 1985 movie, which is a must-see.
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