21 Minutes Into the Future

the Max Headroom chronicles

The Max Headroom saga pretty much ended by 1988 - the shows were over, the New Coke campaign had fizzled, and M-M-Max had pretty much worn out his stay in contemporary culture. But so much was left untapped, unexplored... there is more to tell, but does Max have a future?

The Story

We never really got anywhere in the story - it's all left to tell.

Most television shows, even these days, run with encapsulated episodes. You can watch them in pretty much any order and lose nothing to a misunderstood story arc or missing parts. All of the incarnations of Star Trek are infamous for this - no matter what galaxy-shaking, life-changing events transpire, when the end credits roll everything is back where it started. This makes a show easy to sell - both to the continuing first-run audience, who may or may not have the dedication and patience to follow an evolving storyline, and to syndicated markets, where something as complex as stripping a show in a particular order may be beyond the capability of a program manager.

The trend towards more complex, multi-episode story arcs and evolving characters and situations has taken root in the newer-generation shows such as Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, etc. But most big network offerings are still encapsulated.

(A nod here to the groundbreaking Babylon 5, which may have been the first major television show to start with a long, complex storyline and stick to it, through hell, high water and stupid studio executives. Early on, bad things happened to the wrong people; throughout, you could never be absolutely certain that a headline cast member was going to survive their peril - sometimes they did not.)

It is the rare show of any kind that has a noteworthy first season. The start of a show has to be a certain way, in order to draw in and capture viewers; that way often becomes unbearably contrived or hokey when examined from the perspective of later seasons. It's necessary to explicitly tell the audience things about the background and the characters and the story line, things which can be taken for granted later, leaving more time to actually tell a complex and subtle tale. The first season of Babylon 5 had some truly wretched episodes and some awful out-of-character acting as an audience and the story arc were built and the actors were settling into their roles.

Max Headroom is no exception. There are some painfully lumpy episodes... but they are all we have. Max never even completed a real first season, much less had time for the story to build and characters to flesh out. You can just begin to see the shape of the way it would have been in the last few episodes, as the repetitive details and shallowness begin to be left behind and some complex stories with depth are told. And the unproduced "Theora's Tale" would have been a blockbuster change that shifted the series into a higher gear.

But it was not to be; Max was halted before gaining takeoff speed. It is still possible, I think, to take it around for another pass. A well-wrought two-hour telefilm (or, *sigh*, feature film) would do it, I think - lead to a decent series run in which Max and his cohorts could explore a future even weirder than the one we ended up with.

The Actors

Content

The Public

Content

The Studios

Content

Organization, format, design and all original content ©2005-2009 James Gifford