The spontaneous combustion thankfully remains a bit of a stretch, but anyone who’s experienced a House of Payne ad sliding into the lower third of the screen during a TBS rerun of Family Guy or sat through a sponsored Hulu pre-roll knows the lengths advertisers will go to tap into the shortening attention spans of contemporary audiences. In the show’s very first episode, “Blipverts,” Carter uncovers a top-secret program by advertisers to condense 30-second ads into three-second, high-intensity commercials, which occasionally overloaded audiences’ central nervous systems and caused them to explode. Join them, every two weeks, as they discover the world of Max Headroom, and find that living 20 Minutes Into The Future is actually eerily like living today.Max Headroom was one of the first network shows to engage with these issues, and in doing so made some eerily accurate predictions about where contemporary television was heading.
This time, Austin will be taking a more academic look at the series, using Heather’s first-time perspective to help dig deeper into the material’s social dynamics as they are presented. This experience has left him wanting more, and he has revisited this show several times since then. Austin discovered the show in the Spring / Summer of 1987, and watched it relentlessly until the show disappeared from the airwaves in 1988. All of this will be new, as she is introduced to this material for the first time.Īustin is a radio nerd and musician, and a big “Max Headroom” fan. Heather is in the demographic for it, and yet, has never seen a lick of Max Headroom. Heather is a radio veteran, who currently hosts The Sound of Tomorrow with her co-host, Ross Johnson. A fitting beginning for a show that wants to look at all the details, and figure out what they mean. The Pilot episode will air March 21st, and the second episode – where they discuss the BBC telefilm, will air exactly 36 Years after the original program aired. “20 Minutes Into the Future” is a podcast hosted by Heather & Austin, who plan to track and chart the history of this incredible character, and review some of the media that inspired it.
After three years of massive exposure in nearly every medium, and becoming one of the world’s most preeminent cola salesmen, Max suddenly vanished… and little has been seen of him since.Īlmost 40 years later, it really does seem like Max’s files may have finally gone to the Purge Directory on our cultural network mainframe. First, Max took over in the UK, then moved on to Cinemax and then, finally, improbably, on ABC television, and from there, he went global. What began as an experiment in testing out “cyberpunk” on broadcast television, became “Max Headroom,” who ran rampant through our culture as he moved from mainframe to mainframe, infecting us with the same kind of digital buoyancy that we were all looking for in the late 80’s. Subscribe today, and live… 20 Minutes Into The Future!ģ6 years ago, Channel 4 in the UK took a chance on a very unusual 60 minute “telefilm,” that was to offer the backstory for their new “digital presenter,” who would be showing 13 weeks of music video programing later that Spring and Summer. You can hear a sample of our pilot now if you subscribe to the show: Our Premier Episode will be airing at 23:00 PM, GMT, on 21 March 2021.