Max Headroom LogBook - HTML edition 1.0 by Earl Green

Introduction

Originally conceived as a music video presenter for Britain's Channel 4, Max Headroom was the brainchild of Coast To Coast Productions' Peter Litten & George Dugdale, who produced a version of the pilot episode in Britain as a 90-minute movie. Though most of the cast was different between the U.K. and U.S. pilot (which came later), Matt Frewer, Amanda Pays and William Morgan Sheppard starred in both versions. (Sheppard does not appear in the U.S. pilot, instead making his debut two episodes later. However, the British pilot - which was intended not to launch a series, but to launch Max Headroom as a VJ - featured elements of both Blipverts and Body Banks.)

Max Headroom made his way to the United States in multiple media - a series of Coca-Cola commercials (which, in a way, almost mock the character's anti-corporate-establishment leanings), the

Season One
1987-1988

There was a gap of four months between the first six episodes and the next six before ABC pulled the show from the schedule; some fans refer to this as the show's "second season."

The final two episodes were not included in ABC's original airing of the series, and only appeared later in syndicated packages.

Lost Tapes

Baby Grobags

music video for The Art Of Noise's early song Paranoimia (which prominently featured stream-of-consciousness vocals from Frewer as Max), and the series itself, which premiered as a midseason throaway on ABC in the spring of 1987. Some viewers were delighted, others confused, and many weren't aware that the character had existed before the Coke commercials, and thus blew off the entire show.

Their loss. Admittedly, the series was, early on, guilty of trying to shoehorn the title character into the stories by any means necessary, often intrusively and to the detriment of the story. But at its heart, Max Headroom was a challenging and - with the benefit of 15 years of hindsight - astonishingly prescient look at the mass media and its effects on culture. And it's almost terrifying to think just how much of the series' predictions are dead on with regard to the prevalence of pre-produced news "packages," the importance of ratings in the news game, coverage of terrorism and wars, censorship, televangelism, and the corporate media. Granted, we have yet to develop the technology to suck Matt Frewer into a computer and create a sentient program in his image, but it's only a matter of time.

In Max's future, books have fallen by the wayside, cherished only as mementoes of a bygone era (Blank Reg tries to give a book to a girl in one early episode, only to find it refused after he has to explain that it's a "non-volatile storage medium"). Videotape pirates hand out illegal copies of educational programs to poverty-stricken families, but the police are more concerned about the copyright infringement issues than the public good. And one remarkably astute episode, Grossberg's Return, paints a grimly accurate picture of the news media's role in political campaigning.

In short, this is no Coke commercial. Ahead of its time, Max Headroom perhaps even beats out Babylon 5 and any of the Star Trek spinoffs as the series most deserving of DVD release - and the sooner the better, before its brightly-packaged but wonderfully subversive lessons are lost on today's audience.

MAX HEADROOM and all related characters and placenames are the property of Warner Brothers Domestic Television Distribution and Lorimar Telepictures. This document is not intended to infringe upon their copyright in any way. The author(s) make no attempt - in using the names described herein - to supercede the copyrights of the copyright holders, nor are these pages officially sanctioned, licensed, or endorsed by the shows' creators or producers.

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