Max Headroom was the name of a fictional television character in the late 1980s and of the science fiction television series in which he starred. The character was created by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton.

To create a background story for their announcer, Channel 4 created a one-hour TV movie describing the story of the creation of the computer-generated person. Titled 20 Minutes into the Future, the movie was a dystopic look at a run-down near-future dominated by television and large corporations. It introduced television reporter Edison Carter and his efforts to expose corruption and greed. In the pilot episode, Carter is hunted down by his own employer, Network 23. In the process, he is injured and a scientist working for the channel digitizes his mind into a computer program in an effort to create a replacement who could disguise the fact that Carter had been eliminated. The resulting program takes on a life of its own as the eccentric and unpredictable Max Headroom who can move through computer and television networks at will.

In 1987 the story was turned into a full fledged television series. The original one-hour movie was partially recast and re-filmed as a pilot for a new series on the U.S. based television network ABC.

It was the first cyberpunk series to run in the United States on one of the main broadcast networks in prime time. Like other science fiction, the series introduced the general public to new ideas in the form of cyberpunk themes and social issues. The series portrayed the Blanks, a counter-culture group of people who lived without any official numbers or documentation for the sake of privacy. Various episodes delved into issues like literacy and the lack thereof in a TV-dominated culture (Blank Reg: "It's a book. Non-volatile storage media. Everyone should have one.")

Although it was not a comedy series, low-key (and sometimes dark) humor was a noteworthy part of the entire effect. Some was more overt, such as Max's wisecracking lines, while others were less obvious. One example is the use of traffic signs for character names. The character Max Headroom got his name because, in the original story, Edison Carter crashed into a traffic gate labelled "MAX HEADROOM 2.3m" and was knocked unconscious, and when his brain was digitized, that was the last image present in his consciousness; and thus, his alter-ego's first words. Also the president of Network 23's largest corporate sponsor from Asia, the Zik-Zak corporation, is named Ped Xing. It could be a Chinese name, but it is also the common American traffic sign abbreviation for "pedestrian crossing". In similar fashion to the twisted, yet bizzarely familiar future world of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, the juxtapositions of intentional technological anachronisms were a recurring feature in the series. As Theora types in computer commands for real-time control of satellites, the camera zooms in to show her typing on the keys of a manual typewriter.

In the end, the series all-too-accurately predicted its own demise. With story lines about TV ratings monitored on a second-by-second basis, and the absolute power of the corporate dollar to control what information does and doesn't get expressed to the people through the media of television, the series was evidently a little too far ahead of its time. The second season had noticeably lower quality writing than the first, and after 14 episodes, ABC cancelled it. There was some talk about the character returning in a movie entitled Max Headroom for President but nothing came of it.

As a fad, Max faded from the public eye in the 1990s. In the late 1990s, U.S. cable TV channels Bravo and the Sci-Fi Channel re-ran the series. Reruns also briefly appeared on TechTV in 2001. Science fiction fans eagerly await the show's release on DVD.

- From Wikipedia