Blanks

Blanks are the individuals who have removed themselves from the electronic records, and live their lives without credit, credit tubes, ID or the warm, comfy social safety net. Most live in the Fringes and of necessity have a cash economy. Many, if not most, proudly identify themselves as "the last community of free men." Many are probably criminals in the real sense, but most seem to be despised and hunted by the authorities for avoiding society's rules, from tax avoidance to simply refusing to lock themselves into the grid. Most of those we meet are sophisticated hackers or otherwise tunneling at the roots of lockstep society.

Episodes: All

BBR Score: 10 / 10. As our society has gotten tighter and tighter in control of identity, credit tracking and the like, especially after the events of 9/11, the minority that opt out of the formal records and try to live their lives "off the grid" has increased. There has always been a tiny number of such individuals who avoided the registration, tagging, and marching in lockstep - a large number of them seem to live in the woods of the Pacific Northwest - but the notion of grid-avoiders right here among us civilized types is still pretty radical.

Blipverts

AKA blipvertisements (in the US pilot, for viewers who might be too dim to understand the shorthand version.) Invented by Network 23's clandestine teen technical genius, Bryce Lynch, blipverts or blipvertisements squeeze a 30-second commercial into 3 seconds - conveying the same amount of information through special information compression techniques. Of course, they do cause some indolent viewers to, well, explode... but as Gene Ashwell said, who really cares about such losers?

Episodes: Telefilm, 1.1

BBR Score: 10 / 10. At the time, commercials shorter than 30 seconds were very rare and suspect. (Commercials of one full minute ran well into the 1970s, and major commercials of as long as two minutes were not uncommon in the 1960s.) Now, of course, we're not only down to 10-second hit-and-run commercials, but "screen bug" ads and promos, crawls, and other insidious fast-cut ways to try and sell things to stuporous viewers. The "special techniques" turned out to be the recognition that viewers didn't need a full 30-second playlet to get a point across. No explosions reported yet.

It's gotten even more extreme in the last few years. GE has instituted what it calls "Thirty-Frame Theater," complete visual stories that occupy the thirty video frames of one second of some of their commercials. Only those with the newest video recording systems like TIVO or DVR can pause at this blip and step through the story one frame at a time. The notion of burying one- and two-frame "easter eggs" for the recording and time-shifting audience has become more common; there are often such short blips in the credits of each episode of "The Simpsons." Vance Packard and Wilson Bryan Key aside, these blips are probably too short to have any effect on viewers, or even register as anomalies, much less as content. But don't say we didn't warn you...

Cash

Although credit tubes and online, point-of-sale debit transactions seem to be the norm for the better-off, cash is still around. We see Carter pass over liberal piles to Breugal and Blank Reg in "Body Banks." Cash would have to still exist for any sort of Fringer or Blank economy to exist.

In episode 2.2, a clear reference is made to the monetary unit, the dusty old sci-fi "credit."

Episodes: 1.3

BBR Score: 0 / 10. Even though plastic and electronic money are quite common, cash remains universal. It takes no great foresight to see that cash would remain a common and necessary thing.

Credit Tubes

Looking like a fat aluminum pen with a red band and appearing throughout the series, credit tubes appear to be an all-in-one personal ID and credit/debit "card." We see them used to make purchases, open doors, and identify the holder. They appear to be an individual item, on per person... which makes it kind of mysterious as to why Edison Carter has a fistful when he goes on a shopping spree in episode 2.6, "Neurostim." (We'll call it a story continuity error.)

In episode 2.2, "Deities," we get a good look at people using credit tubes to make donations to the Vu-Age Church. Gene Ashwell is using a cool handheld terminal of some kind to make his donation - a proto-laptop, Palm, or POS terminal? We aren't told.

Episodes: 1.2, 2.2

BBR Score: 5 / 10. We're slowly moving towards an all-in-one ID and credit access tool, but we aren't there yet. The wide use of POS (point-of-sale) terminals was at least a few years ahead of reality, though. If we adopt the idea of a credit tube, it's likely to be in the form of an implanted RFID chip that can't be lost or stolen. We'll skip over the Orwellian control aspects of such a device.

The Fringe / Fringers

The Fringe is the outskirts of the city, a wasteland populated by little but the down-and-out Fringers and their plentiful free televisions. We see them frequently in the background of the stories, surviving on what they can steal... or catch. Like, rats.

Episodes: All, especially 1.3

BBR Score: 0 / 10. We've always had slums and ghettoes; the Fringe is just a Max-era redux, and much is borrowed from other cyberpunk and dystopian literature.

"Life with Polly"

A television show, apparently one of Network 23's highest rated staples. We never see it but it is discussed in a number of episodes. The inference is that it's a saccharine-sweet bit of fluff - a quote about the proposed Raking show is that "it's not 'Life with Polly'!"

Episodes: 1.2

BBR Score: 0/10. Sappy, highly-rated shows are what TV in the '80s was all about.

Raking

A violent street sport that evolved from skateboarding, to motorized skateboarding, to something of a rough jousting sport when kids decided the collisions were as much fun as the moves. Unsavory promoters turned it into an underground blood sport, with wagering, and then tried to sell it to Network 23 - which was actually interested until Edison Carter broke the story of its brutality and exploitation of the kid skaters.

Episodes: 1.2

BBR Score: 0 / 10. Even motorized skateboarding has never caught on. Raking is another half-thought construct for this dismally produced episode, easily the worst of the series.

Networks

At one time, it is said there are ten thousand networks in the world. Whether that comment of Cheviot's is literal or figurative, there are clearly a lot more networks in the Max Headroom world than there were in the real world ca. 1987. Here is a comprehensive list of networks mentioned in the shows.

Network numbers and names are given as available, and those mentioned in only one episode are noted with the episode number. Others are either in every episode or many of them.

(Complete for telefilm and first season, evolving for second season.)

Episodes: All

BBR Score: 10 / 10. We may not have ten thousand channels, but the lists we see in the show look surprisingly ordinary these days - and didn't in that era of three big networks and a few fringey cable channels.

ScumBall

Identified as one of the most popular TV sports (if not the most popular), ScumBall is never fully shown or described. From the short clips we see, it looks like a cross between a demolition derby and car soccer, with dune buggy-like vehicles battling around a huge ball.

Episodes: 1.2

BBR Score: 3 / 10. Although 'car soccer' has been tried a few times, it's not an organized sport and doesn't have much of an audience. Three points, though, for the idea of a wildly popular sport that obsesses the viewers. We have a couple of those, not a few invented purely by the television mavens.

Update: Oh, my god. It's real. I haven't been able to sort humor from reality on this yet, but take a look.

Zik-Zak Corporation

The Zik-Zak corporation is based in Japan (specifically, in New Tokyo) and appears to be one of the major manufacturers of consumer goods in the world. We hear about a surprising number of their products, although some might be products only of Max's overheated imagination.

Zik-Zak is headed by Ped Xing, whose only concern appears to be placing his corporation's advertising in the highest rated positions available.

Episodes: All

BBR Score: 2 / 10. Nothing really new in the idea of a world-straddling mega-corp. Artfully rendered, though.