1988: 'Max Headroom' Makes its Exit on ABC
The title character [of this series] personifies both the intensity and fickleness of late twentieth-century pop culture. At a time when MTV's influence was wide and its taste and hosts were equally bland, Crysalis Records presented Max Headroom as a way to get more exposure for its artists' videos.
On England's Channel 4, and then on America's Cinemax, The Max Headroom Show was a half-hour, self-contained mini-MTV, hosted by a startingly futuristic and refreshingly sarcastic character (portrayed by Matt Frewer). Max Headroom was to rock music what Martin Mull's Barth Gimble, on Fernwood 2-Night, was to small-town America. Max looked like a white Ray Charles, ut with unnaturally gleaming teeth, a sculpted and furrowed skull, and a visual and verbal stutter that was computer-generated.
Purportedly, so was Max himself. A British telemovie, called The Max Headroom Story and quite fittingly produced in the year 1984, explained the origin of the high-tech video wise guy. A TV reporter named Edison Carter (also played by Frewer) was chasing down a hot story in the near future, only to be involved in a serious auto accident involving a menacingly low parking-garage overhang (the last thing Edison saw before losing consciousness is a sign warning, "Max. Headroom 2.3 meters").
The real Carter survived, but not before his personality was injected into, and "enhanced" by, an untested computer program. That personality, a head-and-shoulders video image known as "Max Headroom," also survived to live another day — as a music-video host and interviewer.
It was that incarnation of Max Headroom that became a cult figure in England and America. He made fun of the videos he presented, rarely showed them in complete form, and stood apart from his less animated, less irreverent counterparts on MTV. He was, in short, Beavis and Butt-Head: The Previous Generation.
Success soon went to Max's head (though, come to think of it, where else could it go?). He became the stuttering spokesman for Coca-Cola, added a studio audience to his watered-down TV show, and landed on the covers of national newsmagazines — all before a weekly science-fiction series, picking up where the British telemovie had left off, was launched by ABC. The series, which had its strong and weak points, didn't last long — ending its network run on this day in 1988 — but the memory of Max Headroom will.
—Excerpted from Dictionary of Teleliteracy: Television's 500 Biggest Hits, Misses and Events