Shark Bytes

In your opinion, what's the best movie ever created?

As far as I can remember Max Head room started out as a Channel 4 tv film. Its dark plot to kill the camerman reporter but to keep his brain and personality alive, continued as a series in the uk.
Only when The Us picked it up, did the whole thing became soft and cuddly. It was a bleak future but issues where resolved and mat fewer had a frienly boss. only the dynamic of max the reporter cameraman and his computer operator was the only thing that worked for me. To me, the original was like, the film brazil, meets mad max, meets blade runner, meets the News.

As usual with any good show that is outside the realm of most peoples knowledge, this one was shuffled around until people couldn't find it, and lost interest. Just like what they did to Battlestar Galactica. These idiots that run the television stations think of themselves as gods. And, their "if I don't like it, the people don't like it" mentality is the number 1 problem. Now that we the people have a way of bypassing them, (the internet) they are no longer going to be able to control what we can, and can't see to entertain ourselves with.

me not lik he talk funni.

While I don't thing it jumped that shark, but what REALLY bugged me about this show was: It was perpetually UNDERLIT. You'd think in this techno-based semi-dystopian Future, they'd have better lighting!

"Jumped" when American audiences laid eyes upon it. Sort of a degenerative Heisenberg principle. I am often saddened by what my countrymen think is good. American Gladiators (a contemporary) got more air time. I weep for the future.

It never jumped. Not only because it never had time, but because it was genuinely original, funny and thought-provoking. The irony is that it got pulled by the very forces it set out to parody so well.

It was among the best television I had ever seen when it debuted, and it still is. For the person who said it was based on a commercial, you have it backwards. The first incarnation was an English TV movie. Max crossed the Atlantic and THEN did ads. If only Max, Edison, Theora, Blank Reg, and all the other cool characters could return...

Never jumped. This was one of those shows that was so smart, so cutting, and so terribly different from anything else on TV at the time that one could tell within an episode that it was not long for this world. It's only surprising it lasted as long as it did. Perhaps if it had emerged in the mid to late 90s, things would have been different. By then, there was a proliferation of channels and a growing intellectual depth in pop culture, and that made room for cult hits like the X-Files, Babylon 5, and Buffy the Vampire Salyer, along with more mainstream oddballs, like the Simpsons and Seinfeld. In such a context, Max Headroom's singular vision might have had a chance to survive a few years. In the 80s, though, it never had a chance. Sadly, I think the pendulum has swung back. Today, Max Headroom would be even more quickly canceled, unless it could hook up with a premium cable channel. The production costs alone would doom it against the cut-rate competition and lowest-common-denominator appeal of reality television.

This show gets really bad reviews from people who are suffering from '80s damage, and never even watched it. I saw this back when the show was still on the air. All the time I would hear people talking about how much they hated the show, only for it to turn out upon further examination, that they had never seen a single episode, but were just sick of seeing Max Headroom everywhere. Long before William Gibson, long before the cyberpunk movement, long before Mondo 2000 or Wired Magazine, this show set the stage for the graphic depiction of the modern corporate-driven information age. This was a truly daring, and prophetic bit of television, and in many ways both a high and low point for network TV in the US.

Never jumped. And it was doomed from BEFORE the first episode aired! In my collection Tape 1 (which begins, oddly enough, with Little Shop Of Horrors' "Mean Green Mother From Outer Space" featured on the Oscars Shark-fest a few nights before) the show is preceded by a 10-minute behind-the-scenes segment on 20/20. The last comments about the show "...but will it last when it bites the hands that feeds it?" followed by Max's sound byte (hee hee) "How do you know when a Network-work Executive is lying? His lips-lips-lips are moving!"

Cripes, this show was brilliant! And twisted, and funny, and great to look at, and prophetic, and way, way wrong for 1987! I think a few years later, and probably on a different network, it could have hit big and run forever... and eventually jumped the shark. But you can't have everything. I most admire that the staff never let low ratings and "helpful" suggestions from the network lead them into dumbing it down or tarting it up. (In fact, they had some great jokes about network interference during the second season: life becomes art.) As to it being on against "Hill Street Blues," I think it may have been, at first. I seem to remember it starting out late on some weekday (Tuesday?) before going to early Fridays, and finally to the slot of instant death early on Thursdays, against "The Cosby Show" (where it was canceled TWICE, first when ABC stopped production and took it off the schedule, then later when they out it back on to run the last three unaired episodes, only to yank it again before getting to the third).

Clearly, the show never really had a chance to "JTS" (and excuse me, but "JTS" is one stoopid expression). I still quote Bryce's "there are no failed experiments, only more data".....now what *I* wanna know is, when will Zik-Zak Corp (sp?) be releasing the compilation DVD? Ma-aa-aaa-aX ^L^

Wickedly ahead of its time. Finding the video of the pilot in a North American format was a "personal best". Find it, love it. Be one with Max.

This show never jumped. And I say this to the person who commented, and I quote: "JTS when the network decided to make a TV show based on a commercial for soda. This show SUCKED! My cat licking his non-existent balls is more interesting to watch than this show. Bad idea to make TV shows based on commercials." First of all, the show was around before the commercials, fool. Second of all, it was a spectacular tour-de-force that combined futurist predictions, "modern" technology, great writing, and a stellar cast. It's a damn shame that it was cancelled after only 12 episodes. Matt Frewer has commented that he's got another new "Max" project in the works. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.