On Max Headroom: The Most Misunderstood Joke on TV

January 7, 2022 3:28 PM

Like the show it uses as a jump-off point, the YouTube video "On Max Headroom" is not just about one pretend-robotic talking head. It's about pretending, about talking heads, and about the media landscape 20 minutes into the future.

Also, for once, maybe read the YouTube comments. At least the pinned one.

Via JWZ.

posted by kandinski (49 comments total)

But...but... I MISS Max Headroom!
posted by Goofyy at 3:52 PM on January 7, 2022 [9 favorites]

when the show originally aired it was mostly over my head, since i was a child at the time. a few years ago i watched it for the first time since airing and i though it held up pretty well. obviously not perfectly prescient but pretty good considering.
posted by glonous keming at 4:01 PM on January 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I re-watched the Max Headroom pilot after mentioning it in a thread about dystopian film a little while back. Not perfectly prescient in its details to be sure, but tonally there's a blend of absurdist whimsy and grotesque nihilism there that feels really on-point. It's a lot of fun for something so ultimately bleak, I thought it held up really well.

I have a Max Headroom background for Zoom. I save it for the real ones.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 4:25 PM on January 7, 2022 [8 favorites]

I have always loved Max Headroom, and I think it's high time we heard more from him, now that we're living in his dystopian world.

But he is neither a villain nor a hero. He's just an agent of chaos.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:34 PM on January 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Matt Frewer is a very underrated actor.
posted by Splunge at 4:41 PM on January 7, 2022 [40 favorites]

"Because of course we did," might be the best summation line of a video I've ever heard.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 4:55 PM on January 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have trouble separating Max Headroom and Robocop in my mind... are they in the same cinematic universe?
posted by metametamind at 5:48 PM on January 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

Phobos the Space Potato, where did you find it to watch? I'd quite like to see it again. The idea of the wealthy corporatocracy in high towers and the workers living in dystopia below feels so accurate, esp. in view of American housing. I so enjoy Matt Frewer.
posted by theora55 at 5:53 PM on January 7, 2022

there's a version up on archive.org
posted by glonous keming at 5:56 PM on January 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

1) I've never been able to separate this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_signal_hijacking from the actual TV show. For some reason for the longest time I thought it was a gag the TV show was in on.
B) Max's voice and mannerism remind me so much of Jim Carrey.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 5:57 PM on January 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

Wasn't Max Headroom already rebooted as Logan Paul? Or does that character not glitch out enough?
posted by eustatic at 6:00 PM on January 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I am being bothered by this commentary on cable television which seems to be talking almost exclusively about programming on broadcast television. But I'm only 20m into this perhaps this is the joke.
posted by dumbland at 6:02 PM on January 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

That video exudes Comic Book Guy energy.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:02 PM on January 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I watched Max Headroom when it came out as a 13 yr old and loved how bizarro it was. I can see the Robocop comparisons, it also had some Brazil (Terry Gilliam) vibes to me.
posted by Liquidwolf at 6:21 PM on January 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

The only thing that I remember from the Max show is the cops busting in to clamp down on copyright violations, but not recognizing what a printing-press is.
posted by ovvl at 6:38 PM on January 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

But he is neither a villain nor a hero. He's just an agent of chaos.

I don't know. I think he was more of an angel of chaos.

I did love the phenom at the time. I first heard of Max via people who'd seen the original movie on TV in Britain, and then a VHS tape of it showed up, which became required viewing whenever we were dropping LSD (wanting that twenty minute kick into the future). And then he was showing up in Art Of Noise videos, Coke commercials, talk shows, all manner of weird places. And, of course, then came the network TV show which was thoroughly cool and thus doomed to failure because nothing thoroughly cool ever succeeded in the mainstream 80s, and pretty much all TV was mainstream in the 80s -- that was the business model. You had to score high in the Nielsen ratings or fuck off.

Anyway, good to be reminded.
posted by philip-random at 6:43 PM on January 7, 2022 [10 favorites]

I love Max Headroom and have rewatched it several times, although not in a couple of years, so maybe it's time.

I enjoyed this video a lot. I never saw Max as a friend, and I sort of do support the idea of his return into today's climate.
posted by hippybear at 9:02 PM on January 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I might not have been old enough to get all of the joke as a kid watching the series, but I have no doubt that watching the TV show, with its "20 Minutes into the Future" setting had a disturbingly formative effect on me. I enjoyed this, but damn, I loved that show, and the relentless (and, well, yeah, probably on target) criticism of the show was a little disappointing. Could it have been better? I don't know of any show made around the same time that couldn't (and I'd have put in The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr. in the little inserts about shows cancelled too soon, but that's just me).

I would like to see a reboot. Hell, I would like to see the show the narrator dislikes so much remade, but yes, using these critiques. At least one fantastic aspect of it would/could be that Max is most definitely an, if not the antagonist, supplanting/overshadowing the journalist (I'd like to stick to that at least, though it would be interesting to see other ideas) he was modeled on.

As much as any reboot and all the accompanying commodification of our collective nostalgia would be a prime target for any proper Max Headroom adaptation ("I'm that thing you kind of remember, and I'm here to give you that jolt of nostalgia while profiting off of your positive feedback, and while I'm *jussst* a bit different, it won't be in anyway that would challenge your connection with me"), it would be nice if, with all of the remakes and re-imaginings, we could get some of the good stuff remade.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:22 PM on January 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

I remember when David Letterman asked him if he had a plate in his head once and he answered I'VE GOT A WHOLE S-S-S-ET OF CHIN-N-N-NA-A-A!
posted by y2karl at 9:36 PM on January 7, 2022 [11 favorites]

I keep hoping someone will resurrect Max Headroom in his full AI glory, since the technology pretty much exists now. Obviously, the speech generators would have to be carefully vetted since letting one loose on a speech dataset can produce some pretty unsettling results. But, everything else can easily be synthesized.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:49 PM on January 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think of Max Headroom every single time there’s a news story about video/interactive tombstones or advertisers hacking your dreams.
posted by bixfrankonis at 9:52 PM on January 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

I keep hoping someone will resurrect Max Headroom in his full AI glory

Oh dear god, no! Keep comedy writers employed. Maybe have some AI prompts, but really, the results will be better with humans doing the writing.
posted by hippybear at 9:55 PM on January 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

I keep hoping someone will resurrect Max Headroom in his full AI glory

Frewer has been acting for a long time. There is already a lot of material to throw into an AI, probably.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:39 PM on January 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm at the late night talk show hosts part of the video and I will admit I gave a loud chuckle at the Fallon & Corden visual punchlines. If anyone is interested in the sausage is made, Stephen Colbert (accidentally??) gave a very (VERY) thorough answer -- 20-plus minute long plus an ad break --when he showed up on Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan's podcast, which does provide even more background.

i miss Max Headroom, I actually caught the show whenever it's on the air (I think we got the American spinoff mainly though I did remember the British movie played beforehand). I didn't get most of it being a child, but something about him I really like. Randomly I even got given some Japanese foam head merchandise as well... and I didn't have the kind of childhood to get such random toys and merch.
posted by cendawanita at 10:39 PM on January 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

In the meatspace contemporary times though, I really think Ziwe's Max's true successor, even down to the struggle of actually trying to make the concept work in actual mainstream media.
posted by cendawanita at 10:50 PM on January 7, 2022

Max Headroom may have started out as a villain, but really he was way too much fun to stay one. I remember the ABC show actually making him pretty much just a silly mascot, for the most part.

The critiques of late night talk show hosts the video makes were rather misplaced relative to the time Max Headroom's talk show came out. His main example is Fallon puffing up Donald Trump, which was awful, but in the 80s that had yet to happen. There were awful politicians then, true (the show flashes Reagan on the screen for a moment), but awfulness had yet to become quite as pervasive.

Arguably the adversarial talk show format was done much better by Space Ghost Coast To Coast, which borrowed a lot from Max Headroom, although on it it was the guest who was stuck in the video monitor. Space Ghost got to last a lot longer than Max. But also, SGCTC recorded their interviews outside the show, then tore them apart to adapt them into its format, while Max Headroom presented them, for the most part, straight. This meant that M.H. had to rely on Matt Freuer's improv skills, while SGCTC could turn slot the interview into whatever crazy story they could come up with.
posted by JHarris at 12:20 AM on January 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I am being bothered by this commentary on cable television which seems to be talking almost exclusively about programming on broadcast television. But I'm only 20m into this perhaps this is the joke.

I kind of like the idea that since this whole video essay was uploaded on April 4, 2039, a few details about how television worked were lost or just overlooked by the editors of the essay itself.
posted by alex_skazat at 12:29 AM on January 8, 2022

My memory of Max Headroom back in the 80s was that the character was this cultural phenomenon initially from things like TV commercials. Only much later was there a TV show that had an actual storyline and everything. I may have that backwards, though.
posted by zardoz at 12:35 AM on January 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I will say I'm not as keen as the essayist about the idea of a reboot, especially if it's trapped in the aesthetics, which seemed presciently satirical but now barely distinguishable from actual media. It might actually commit the mistake of being outdated or barely beyond reality (the Onion problem). I think the trend to anticipate and skewer is the endpoint to all this quest for authenticity and parasocial relations. I think sincerity is the human emotion currently being hijacked by the culture.
posted by cendawanita at 1:09 AM on January 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

The original UK Channel 4 The Max Headroom Show from 1985 is on youtube, it's mostly 80s music videos.
posted by Lanark at 1:30 AM on January 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Max Headroom may have started out as a villain, but really he was way too much fun to stay one.

So was Skeletor but they (rightly) didn't give him a face turn.
posted by acb at 3:56 AM on January 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I dunno, the first of those 80s music videos is a singer with a unplaceable accent singing a paraphrase of a McDonalds advertising slogan, in a song about how the ideal American restaurant would serve only food made of rats.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 4:06 AM on January 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hmm, a guy with a youtube channel with 9000+ subscribers arguing other people misunderstood the joke with Max Headroom the first time, it needs a reboot so he can enjoy watching a show that would better expose the vapidity and moral failings of media culture feels like its buried beneath so many layers of irony that it would require a team of postmodern archeologists to even begin to dig through it all.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:16 AM on January 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Also, surely by now someone has made a fully rigged 3D model of Max Headroom's head and torso
posted by acb at 4:26 AM on January 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

>its buried beneath so many layers of irony that it would require a team of postmodern archeologists to even begin to dig through it all.
The way that postmodern archaeologists dig things is by up-voting them.
posted by k3ninho at 7:03 AM on January 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

This model looks pretty good, just needs rigging. There's surely enough audio to generate an Uberduck.ai TTS model. Heck, we can have him reading @dril tweets by evening.
posted by credulous at 7:11 AM on January 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ok. The notion of Max as a villain is an interesting take, however, I think the author is missing a clear correlation between Stephen Colbert's character and the imagined actual AI or robot underpinning Max headroom. If you take the origin story as canon, though, it's a bit unclear if the origin story was retconned after the creation or before, it's very possible to interpret Max as the thing that Edison Carter would create to skewer the insincerity and vapidness that he most feared, very much aligned with what a Daily Show alum and humanist like Stephen Colbert would create to both satirize the casual cruelty and assiduous lack of self-awareness of Bill, O'Reilly and friends.

This is to say, the character of right wing Stephen Colbert isn't himself a villain, but a way to express villainy in a way that is entertaining and recognizable. My take is that -effectively - Max headroom ( The pretend robot AI character born from a crusading journalist) is conscious of this act and uses every means in a way that not only is it aware of, but takes enormous advantage of the uncanny valley to allow him to nail those heel turns of revelation or logic followed to extremes. In some ways being divorced from the actual meat body of his template, Max can be creatively subversive in a way that is unhuman but uniquely humane.

Since we're over here in deep dork Sylvania, this is actually a similar concept to a particular head cannon I have about Portal's GladOS - probably long since contravened by actual writing I've failed to pay attention to - but imagine you're a superhuman AI in the universe of Half-life where you are smart and perceptive enough to be able to understand the incoming interdimensional invasion but not equipped to affect it or even warm people - the way your mind might break would be to fall back in on yourself and use your set of skills and talents to "breed" (mentally speaking) creatures who might survive, "for the people who are still alive." It is enticing but not well. Supported to believe that a superhuman intelligence can do anymore self-modifying of its core templates than we can as baseline human intelligences - especially when that intelligence is completely unique. And uniquely disconnected from any entity that could help it develop a theory of mind, and thus compassion and empathy.

Sure, the ABC TV show was watered down cyberpunk, but it was still richer in that vein than anything else on broadcast TV at the time. I reveled in the idea of copyright police coming after educational television and underground pirates who wanted to teach kids to read. My young teenage brain hadn't even considered the possibility that withholding education was an option much less a means of control. (Why yes, I grew up in a state where history classes cited states' rights as the primary reason for the civil war, why do you ask?)

Of course Edison Carter the character holds up poorly, like every 80s patriarchy wet dream producers and networks are committed to inserting their values into their programming to normalize behavior advantageous to them like workplace harassment and anger-as-righteous justification. That whole bit is both valid and also unremarkable compared to everything else at the time.

Anyway, I don't really love the idea of any kind of vaporwave Max headroom reboot, actual AI or comedy writer vehicle. At least not until it can be an actual actual AI as opposed to the artificial opinion machines we are currently capable of making.
posted by abulafa at 7:15 AM on January 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

there's a version up on archive.org

That's the American TV series but what you really want is the Channel 4 made-for-TV film.

ZIK ZAK ZIK ZAK KNOW FUTURE
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:25 AM on January 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Blipverts
posted by rfs at 7:50 AM on January 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I saw this video via JWZ's blog. I know we're all inured not to look at YouTube comments, but you should note the pinned comment at the bottom of the video: "Thank you for understanding. Excellent observation. Bullseye." - from one of the creators of Max Headroom interviewed in the video!

Whoops - I should read the entire post!
posted by scolbath at 8:02 AM on January 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I am being bothered by this commentary on cable television which seems to be talking almost exclusively about programming on broadcast television. But I'm only 20m into this perhaps this is the joke.

Part of the joke is they’re pretending to be making this in 2059 so they’re assuming cable TV has run it course and it’s all streaming. They’re a bit subtle about it and I didn’t notice it at first. Same way they talk about all late hosts in the past tense.
posted by jmauro at 8:31 AM on January 8, 2022

I still get a bit bothered when Max is viewed as an AI or a robot. I'm with abulafa and can't tell if the origin story came first or not but Max is clearly Edison's brain transplanted into a box and done somewhat incompletely, thus the glitching and inversion of Edison's id and ego. The movie also explains that Max v0.9 was a parrot, which retroactively explains Max's visual ticks.

Kind of like The Dixie Flatline, but with more spunk.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:18 AM on January 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Loved Max Headroom as a kid as I was fascinated by computer graphics and that's what I thought it was. I have only now realised that it was a guy in makeup.

Also I loved how extremely sardonic and smart he seemed, he may well been the most cynical thing that existed in the 80s, certainly that I was aware of, and I was kind of awestruck by that blanket cynicism.

I think this video essay could have been a lot shorter though and left out all the juvenile reaction memes.
posted by mokey at 10:46 AM on January 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

> That's the American TV series but what you really want is the Channel 4 made-for-TV film

rad. i will watch this later tonight.
posted by glonous keming at 10:56 AM on January 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

That video exudes Comic Book Guy energy.

I do admit that I made it about 10-15 minutes into this vid and couldn't go much further. Talk show hosts are white guys, except for perhaps less-recognized exceptions like Arsenio Hall, Trevor Noah, Chris Rock etc. I grew up in the 80s with Max Headroom — can someone summarize this interpretation for me? (I am interested, if distracted. A blipvert would be fine.)
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:40 PM on January 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

"I get this character on a much deeper level because I'm smarter than everyone else was so I can tell what they were thinking, and the show wasn't what I want it to be, therefore it should be remade so it's way more rad and edgy."
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:53 PM on January 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

→ ... it's mostly 80s music videos.

Yeah, in the UK I remember the whole movie thing being very tiny compared to Max Headroom the music video show.
posted by scruss at 2:05 PM on January 8, 2022

Who wore it better, Blank Reg or Yondu?
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:44 PM on January 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

can someone summarize this interpretation for me?

His main gripe is that the character started out as a villain and worked better that way, but in the US TV series he became one of the good guys, so it didn't work as well.
posted by mokey at 1:24 AM on January 9, 2022 [1 favorite]