Lotusblog

The decade of the nineteen-eighties was responsible for so much of what is good in the world, but similarly, for so much of what is bad. Maybe in twenty years’ time we’ll say that about this decade, too.

But it’s hard to reconcile the fact that Max Headroom, one of the most profound, dark and disturbing TV series ever made was running back-to-back with Webster, Family Ties and The Greatest American Hero. In fact, 20 years on, it’s amazing to see just how much of an influence Max Headroom has had not only on entertainment, but also network broadcasting. Maybe it didn’t actually influence TV network broadcasting in a direct way, but it certainly made predictions and hinted at a future that actually has very much come true. “Embedded journalism”, such as the type we saw throughout Gulf War 2.0, is probably the best example, but as you watch the series, time and time again you see in the fantastic-20-minutes-in-the-future-world things that don’t seem quite so amazing now that we deal with them every day.
In entertainment, you realise the huge debts that SF movies such as the Matrix trilogy and Minority Report owe to our favourite eighties show.

Now that twenty years or so has passed, maybe we are due for a revival. If the movie companies are happy to spend tens of millions making movie versions of TV shows like Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels, then surely they could do us all a favour and make a Max Headroom movie. The only thorny bit of this plan, is that we all know how much the movie would suck.