Someone shouts out “Where you been Max?” “Everywhere,” says Max, four times, illustrated. “A more modem taste than, than, than”-Max’s looped stutter cues the audience to shout as one, “Pepsi!” “You said the P word!” chides Max.

“They must be talking about me,” he says with perfect false modesty. He has been assigned non-Classic Coke, formerly New Coke, “the new wave in taste.” In “The Cokeologists Reunion” Max addresses an assembly of slightly futuristic yuppie types in a retrofuturist set with Corinthian columns and a vast video screen. He drinks the idea of Coke, the image of Coke. His speech is full of quirky shifts in pitch that register his “emotions.” Max Headroom is an electronic person. He talks the way a rap dj manipulates records, “scratching” his words for emphasis, emphasis, emphasis. Max Headroom is the prototype of the man of the future who has absorbed the logic of the technology he uses. Because he’s linked in to the network’s computer system, Max is semi-all-knowing. Able to visit any TV set and see through it, Max is semi-all-seeing. He is also its biggest problem because he is free in the system, roaming through the circuitry at will he cannot be controlled or destroyed without destroying the system. Because of this extreme candor and a sharp wit Max becomes the biggest star on Network 23. He says whatever comes into his mind he has no fear.

His superego was apparently lost in the programming. What that means in practice is that Max has no inhibitions. He is innocent because he does not have a physical body: being an image, a nonobject, he is totally objective. He is a soul with looks, good looks, but no touch, an angel. Max Headroom is the ultimate talking head. The Network’s teenage head of R & D programs Carter’s memory into his experimental computer and Max Headroom is born: a renegade TV personality, running loose through network programming. Before he revives, he is given a “memory scan,” ordered by the network executives, to see what he learned about blipverts. Carter, trying to escape from an underground garage on a motorcycle, hits a descending barrier marked “MAX HEADROOM” and nearly dies. Under pressure from their biggest foreign customers, his own network decides to put out a contract on him. Carter is hot on the story that “blipverts,” rapid-montage commercials, explode the heads of something like one in a thousand viewers (shades of Tony Conrad’s 1966 film The Flicker and of David Cronenberg’s 1981 film Scanners). He goes about tracking down stories for live broadcast, directed by his beautiful controller Theora via computer and satellite hookup. Max’s genesis: Edison Carter is a top reporter for Network 23. The networks battle it out in the instant ratings 24 hours a day. It takes place “20 minutes into the the future,” where television works both ways: you see it it sees you. Max Headroom is more than human, and his series is television about television.

Max headroom netflix