20 Minutes

“20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE…”

I have never watched Max Headroom before. It’s always been something on the periphery of my awareness, and of course I’m fairly familiar with the infamous Max Headroom TV signal hack. But I never saw the real thing until very recently. I just finished 1x05, “War.” I’ve watched it very slowly and hadn’t resumed it until yesterday, as I’d been busy with Millennium and other stuff.

Matt Frewer plays the titular character, as well as his “meatspace” counterpart, Edison Carter, an investigative TV news reporter for “Network 23” (wondering if this is a strange, more sensational version of Fox?). Somehow, Max is created out of Edison’s memories and personality, and becomes a sort of AI, ever-present, living in any and all computer systems, the ghost in the machine. And though he is generally a chaos agent at best, he is friends with Edison, and generally looks out for him and his people.

I’ve spent enough time with William Gibson’s works to know how much of an influence they were on the show. “ICE,” short for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, is thrown around nonchalantly and glossed simply as a security system in “Security Systems” (1x04); anyone familiar with Neuromancer would ken that immediately. And honestly, watching the show is like watching the world of the “Sprawl Trilogy” vel sim. come to life. It’s all lovingly crafted, with a cheeky, fun, hacker ethos, facing dystopia with a smile and a glib remark. It’s a hell of a lot of fun thus far, but also can be super gloomy.

I get vague vibes of Smash TV as well, mostly with the cutthroat world of TV networks competing for ratings. There’s just so much going on at any given time. I’m honestly surprised that this show got made at all, but if it was going to get made, 1987 makes sense. I wonder if this inspired any of KLF’s aesthetics for their music? I find it fun that Zach Snyder, who wants everyone to think of him as a geek’s geek, but isn’t fooling many people, cast Matt Frewer as Moloch in the Watchmen movie. I had no idea who Frewer was, except a vague whisper about his work on Max Headroom, at the time, but now I find it pretty cool. It’s fun to get the references finally, to be in the know.

I don’t have many concrete thoughts on all of it. I’m just enjoying the ride. There isn’t much of it, but I think I’ll still end up watching it fairly quickly. My idea is to watch On the Air, a very short-lived Lynch/Frost followup to Twin Peaks, also about a TV network and other weirdness, probably after I finish it. I’ve watched one episode, and couldn’t figure out what was going on, but I’d like to give it another spin. I’m plumbing weird depths of TV history these days, trying to fill in the gaps.

anyways, thanks for reading. I just had some thoughts and wanted to get them down, y’know?