This essay is in our Media Club series, an ongoing series of essays on visual media. Pitch us something! More details here.
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Seeking: Max Headroom
Avery Gregurich
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Max Headroom first found me the way that God always intended: inside my television, hiding out on Tubi. This was not more than a month ago. When I say that Max Headroom found me, I mean Max Headroom, the 1987 American TV show. I don't know what I mean when I say God.
It’s important to work in specifics when thinking about Max. For a brief stretch there in the late 80s, he was everywhere. Billed as the world’s first “AI” TV show host, Max Headroom began as the British response to MTV veejays. On The Max Headroom Show, he spammed episodes, popping up between music videos and trolling viewers with fake advertisements, celebrity impressions, and other imagined soliloquies from a completely “computer-generated” person.
Max got three different TV shows in total, some New Coke ads, an appearance on Letterman, plus his own Christmas special, Max Headroom's Giant Christmas Turkey. Somehow, I had missed Max entirely, all of it, including the TV broadcast hijackings that bear his name: the Max Headroom Incidents.
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On the night of November 22, 1987, the broadcast signal of Chicago’s WGN-TV was hijacked by what the papers later called “television pirates.” During highlights of that afternoon’s Bears victory over the Detroit Lions, the signal cut to video of a person swaying back and forth in front of a twisting metal screen, wearing an oversized plastic Max Headroom mask.
If Max was speaking, it didn’t make it into the broadcast. Back and forth he went, swaying for about a half a minute, rocking back forth amongst waves of errant static. Then the video signal rippled, cut to black as engineers at WGN regained control of the broadcast. After, sportscaster Dan Roan appeared standing behind the Sports Desk next to a graphic of a football that said “BEARS BONUS”.
"Well, if you're wondering what's happened, so am I,” he said. “Actually, the computer we have running our news from time to time took off and went wild, so what we are going to do is start over from the top of the Bears and tell you once again about the 30 to 10 victory they had…"
Approximately two hours after the initial broadcast signal attack, the hijackers targeted a second Chicago television network. During the middle of a public television broadcast of Doctor Who: Horror of Fang Rock, Max Headroom appeared again. This time he spoke.
For around two minutes, Max Headroom delivers a series of non sequiturs with a panicked, semi-human voice. “Catch the wave!” he says and throws a can of Coke down, out of frame. He sings a line from The Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and hums the Clutch Cargo theme song. “I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds!” the person in the Max Headroom mask says near the end. The signal cuts back to Dr. Who just as a woman begins hitting Max Headroom’s bare ass with a fly swatter.
The broadcast was terminated by the hijackers themselves.
No arrests have ever been made in the case, and no suspects have ever been named.
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How is it that we’ve made it here to the age of artificial intelligence realized, and Max Headroom is not around?
I’ve spent the holiday season switching back and forth between the hijacking footage and Max Headroom. I’ve written “WHERE IS MAX HEADROOM?” across the top of several different pages of a notebook, and taken very serious notes toward finding an answer. I started watching videos analyzing the transcript of the hijackings. Right now, my algorithms are actively working to feed me more Max. Instagram reels. Youtube videos. A targeted ad for an A.I. Max Headroom voice changer. Watching the show, I tried to steady myself with hack synopsis and trivial details. The usual suspects.
As the weeks went on, I kept waiting for Max Headroom to mean more. To me, or the current moment, or to whatever it is that causes us to still do this. I’m sure that when it’s done right, essaying can look like a manic form of prayer. Hours spent (still) staring at screens, but now it’s been given a purpose. To craft an account that attempts to corral and mark our virtual wandering. A human life lived as a language learning model.
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Max Headroom begins in total snowstorm static. Then, scenes from a broken city. Skyscrapers rise in the distance. A chyron appears: 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE. Cut to a newsroom in full production panic, calling out to their reporter in the field, a man with a camera who’s delivered onto the scene via helicopter. Hanging out the side of the news chopper, he turns the lens towards his face and goes “live and direct,” staring straight down the barrel and holding the camera on himself.
“This is Edison Carter, answering the questions other people are afraid to ask and what I want to know is this…”
The pilot, “Blipverts,” is a remake of the original bit of Max Headroom media, the 1985 British TV movie, Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future.
Turns out that Max Headroom isn’t really about Max Headroom at all. It’s about his human component, Edison Carter, a man presented throughout the series as somehow both a rogue, fearless truth-seeker and the media conglomerate’s biggest star. In the pilot, Carter’s story gets pulled after he starts investigating his own network’s latest advertising technology, “blipverts”, or concentrated television ads that can sometimes cause viewers’ bodies to explode.
While attempting to escape from Network 23 headquarters, Carter is thrown off a motorcycle and his head collides with a parking gate. Blood drips from the dented metal reading “MAX HEADROOM.” In order to find out what Carter has seen, the television network decides to feed a floppy disk Carter's consciousness into a computer.
Out comes Max Headroom, an A.I. construct of Carter, desperately reaching for language and wearing a tie. Carter survives the motorcycle crash, and using the memories stored in Max Headroom, exposes the network’s use of “blipverts.”
With its sci-fi camp and cyberpunk weirdness, the show predicted a future that sure looks a lot like this one, a dystopia wrought from convenience and corporate greed, and defined by artificial intelligence, corporate journalism, digital surveillance, and the inevitable merger of technology and humanity. Heavy stuff for major network television in 1987. The show didn’t stand a chance against Alf or Dallas or Miami Vice. At the end of the year, Max Headroom landed at 101st in the ratings. It ran fourteen episodes in all. and only two of them aired after the Max Headroom Incidents.
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I am wondering why the Max Headroom hijackers have never come forward. Why they have never been found. If anyone else is still even looking for them.
The Max Headroom Incidents were the last in a trio of high profile television hijackings during the late 80s, all of which happened during the peak of Max Headroom’s popularity. The first happened during an episode of The Falcon and the Snowman. At 12:32 A.M., HBO’s satellite was hacked by a person calling themselves "Captain Midnight." His grievance was clear, prescient still.
The second happened two months before the Max Headroom Incidents, when a porno playing on the Playboy Channel was interrupted by a bible verse: "Thus sayeth the Lord thy God: Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Repent for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
Suspects were identified and arrests were made in both cases. Captain Midnight was identified as John R. MacDougall, a satellite dish salesman who viewed the hack as a protest against HBO’s high subscription prices, which he cited as ruining his business. At the time of the hijacking, he was working a second job as a master control operator at a satellite teleport, and hacked the signal from there.
Thomas Haynie was of course an employee of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and shared his selection of scripture from Exodus and Matthew while working as a satellite uplink engineer. Along with the Playboy Channel, Haynie was also charged with hijacking the American Exxxtasy channel the same night, charges that were eventually dropped. The pair were each sentenced to probation, a few thousand dollars in fines, and community service. Which makes me wonder why the Max Headroom hijackers have never come forward.
The statute of limitations expired back in 1992. Their Wikipedia page takes special care to say that the people “responsible for the intrusion would no longer face criminal punishment should their identities be revealed.”
There’s an element of youth to all of it, the idea itself and the construction of a set and sculpting of a Max Headroom mask and of course the bare ass and flyswatter, which in my head places those responsible in their mid-to-late 60s today. Given the pattern, it’s probably some one or several people who worked in satellite broadcasting in the greater Chicago area in 1987. I’d measure it a major success of my life, being able to track these people down and ask them why they did it.
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Near the end of the pilot, Edison Carter meets Max Headroom, his digital self. It’s played to be a moment of pure wonder, serene and profound. And who amongst us wouldn’t want to meet ourselves, to look them in the eye and ask them what it's like to be inside the screen?
Part of essaying I think is seeing prophecy in old television shows. It almost seems quaint to say, but Max Headroom warned us about how much of our lives would occur digitally, online and disembodied. Individual realities constructed by algorithms. Max’s disappearance and subsequent absence from the larger culture feels purposeful.
Still, you can find pieces of Max Headroom all around. When Netflix tries to buy Warner Bros., Max Headroom is there, hiding somewhere in the paperwork. Max is there when major TV networks partner with a gambling site to overlay betting odds on live news events. And Max Headroom is certainly there when Tubi runs an ad for ChatGPT while you watch episodes of Max Headroom.
I wonder how long now I’ll be followed by both Max Headrooms, whether it’ll be tomorrow or a year from now when I’m prompted again to remember both the character and the broadcast hijacker. A TV show reboot was announced a few years ago, so there’s still hope that they will ruin Max yet.
“What happened to the old religions?” Edison Carter asks his producer Murray halfway through the series.
“I don't know,” Murray says. “Television killed it. We have better miracles.”
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Avery Gregurich lives and writes in eastern Iowa, and organizes The Out Of Towners Reading Series.