And he wasn't finished.Īlmost exactly two hours later, at around 11:15 PM, Channel 11, the PBS affiliate WTTW, was airing an episode of Dr. (The dateline on every episode was "twenty minutes into the future.") By the time the show was canceled, the sarcastic square-jawed fake-rendered mug was as well known to the cult TV viewers of the late 80s as the Guy Fawkes mask is to the people of Twitter today.Īt 9:16 PM, just after the faux Max intruded on WGN's signal, technicians there, suspecting an inside job, began scouring the building for a possible assailant. Max Headroom was the cyberpunk on mainstream TV, imagining a digital world that turned out to be not very far from 1987. The result not of computers but of painstaking make-up and prosthetics on top of the comedian Matt Frewer, Max was a dark parody of real-life TV newscasters in a television landscape where news and entertainment were already bleeding into each other. Still, the effect of Max's perpetually skipping, computerized face was hard to forget. In Chicago, it aired on the ABC affiliate Channel 7, and would last for 11 episodes and into a brief second season that fall, before it was canceled, beaten in the ratings by Miami Vice.
Max Headroom, which featured the exploits of a TV journalist living in a dystopian future, with a digital alter ego in the form of the title character, debuted on March 31, 1987. His sarcastic wit and stuttering delivery-along with an ad campaign for New Coke, a late-night talk show on Cinemax, and a few TV specials-had made him a cult personality even before he finally earned his own hour-long TV show in the US. "The world's first computer-generated TV host," as he might have proudly boasted, was a sharp-tongued character inaugurated in 1985 as the veejay for a British music television show. To many clued-in TV viewers that night, the face of Max Headroom would have been unmistakable. It may as well have come from another dimension.
Within hours, federal officials would be called in to investigate one of the strangest crimes in TV history-a rare broadcast signal intrusion, with no clear motive, method, or culprits.
0 kommentar(er)
