20 Minutes Into The Future

So for some reason -- perhaps it was the Art of Noise cover of the Peter Gunn theme on Radio Nigel, or the fact that this week is premiere week for TV's fall season, or just leftover nostalgia from last night, but I was reminiscing about probably my favorite show to ever air, Max Headroom.  While I never got to see the show when it was originally on (I was only 10, and it was on past my bedtime, you see), when Bravo started showing the episodes when I was in high school I would watch them all when they aired at some ungodly hour.  Coincidentally, that was also when I was getting into cyberpunk something fierce (especially Shadowrun), so the show managed to pretty much hit me at exactly the right time.  I do remember media saturation with the title character during the mid-'80s though, thanks to the Coke ads and other appearances (like the homages to Max in Back to the Future II).

It was probably the best -- if not the only good -- depiction of a cyberpunk future I've seen on TV, even to this day.  It had everything -- giant megacorporations that controlled the fate of nations, a populace lulled into ignorance and complacency by mass media, people living on the edge, trying to maintain an existence free from government and corporate intrusion, police more subservient to corporate law than the people, a massive, all-encompassing computer network, and almost every other cyberpunk trope you can think of, short of actual cyberware.  It was treated like a serious subject (Max's witty banter aside) and brought up issues that have sadly become closer and closer to reality as time has worn on (as pointed out in the Wikipedia article on the show).

I suspect Matt Frewer, Amanda Pays, Jeffery Tambor, W. Morgan Sheppard, and Chris Young will always be Edison, Theora, Murray, Blank Reg, and Bryce Lynch to me, and I wonder when they are going to finally release this show on DVD -- I, and I suspect many others, would pick it up in a heartbeat.   Sadly, I don't think there's any plans to do so, nor does there seem like much chance of any sort of revival project; let's face it, Max is and always will be a part of the '80s, even if it feels like we're rapidly becoming the world that was depicted there.  Ironically, Bryce Lynch was supposedly born in 1988, which means that Max Headroom takes place somewhere around 2004 or 2005, placing the show that was once 20 minutes into the future into the box full of retrofutures that includes flying cars, moon bases, and sentient computers.