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xiphiasI've been thinking for a while that it's time for a reboot of the 1987-88 cyberpunk TV show MAX HEADROOM, and it's only gotten more and more important as news has continued to get even more and more centralized, corporate, ratings-driven, and propagandist. Every day, the idea of a fearless, scrappy, hero independent news organization gets more vital. It's been three decades since it was twenty minutes into the future, and it's gotten worse and worse every twenty minutes since then.
So I've spent a lot of my not-thinking-about-other-things time thinking about how I would do it if it was up to me.
First: where does the show go? I think this would have to be an cheap, indie, online-only show on something like Geek and Sundry, or maybe just a YouTube channel. Funding would be tricky -- Kickstarter? Patreon? Geek-related ads? Ironically, doing it ad-supported would be exactly the sort of thing that MAX HEADROOM was pointing out the dangers of...
What else? Race and gender blind casting. No reason Theora can't be Theo, or Edison can't be Edie. No reason anybody in the cast has to be any particular race. Some characters ought to be specific ages -- Bryce has to be a teenager or younger; Murray has to be middle aged; Blank Reg has to be old enough to be worn down by life -- but a lot of characters can be age-blind cast, as well. Although, if the cast starts to be all white and male, it might be worthwhile to mulligan and draw again... the cast really should be as diverse as a semi-underground crusading group would be in reality. So, like, gender-blind from a pool of the sorts of people who would show up to support Antifa...even more so for people who work with the straight-up anarchist Big Time Television.
I think I would change Network 23 to being smaller and non-corporate. While the fight between a corporate board and an attempt at an independent news organization was a major theme in the original, I think that, at this point, corporations are too powerful for that to be useful. Network 23 is a corporation which is fundamentally ethical -- dragged forcibly into ethical behavior against its own will, but still, a good guy corporation. I'd just dump that. The way I'd do MAX HEADROOM, there just wouldn't be a good guy corporation. Network 23 would be fighting for legitimate bandwidth on something YouTube-like, and you could have people working within THAT company trying to allow them access and not throttle them down to, well, nothing (no Net Neutrality means that the YouTube expy has the right to shut them down if they want to). Reg's channel would be straight-up pirate, hacking their way into piggybacking on someone else's bandwidth.
Tech. Edison would obviously not be working with his big, bulky shoulder-mounted camera. It would obviously be a Google-glass-like face rig, although the camera would be mounted obviously so that people could see that he was a journalist. If he wanted to speak to the audience, he'd use a mirror.
And Max?
The same. Nothing really needs to be changed about Max. I mean, Max would actually be computer generated, rather than a makeup and camera trick job, but it would be a computer generated avatar of much, much lower resolution than the things which we are used to today.
So that's what I want. Anyone know who I should talk to in order to make it happen?
So I've spent a lot of my not-thinking-about-other-things time thinking about how I would do it if it was up to me.
First: where does the show go? I think this would have to be an cheap, indie, online-only show on something like Geek and Sundry, or maybe just a YouTube channel. Funding would be tricky -- Kickstarter? Patreon? Geek-related ads? Ironically, doing it ad-supported would be exactly the sort of thing that MAX HEADROOM was pointing out the dangers of...
What else? Race and gender blind casting. No reason Theora can't be Theo, or Edison can't be Edie. No reason anybody in the cast has to be any particular race. Some characters ought to be specific ages -- Bryce has to be a teenager or younger; Murray has to be middle aged; Blank Reg has to be old enough to be worn down by life -- but a lot of characters can be age-blind cast, as well. Although, if the cast starts to be all white and male, it might be worthwhile to mulligan and draw again... the cast really should be as diverse as a semi-underground crusading group would be in reality. So, like, gender-blind from a pool of the sorts of people who would show up to support Antifa...even more so for people who work with the straight-up anarchist Big Time Television.
I think I would change Network 23 to being smaller and non-corporate. While the fight between a corporate board and an attempt at an independent news organization was a major theme in the original, I think that, at this point, corporations are too powerful for that to be useful. Network 23 is a corporation which is fundamentally ethical -- dragged forcibly into ethical behavior against its own will, but still, a good guy corporation. I'd just dump that. The way I'd do MAX HEADROOM, there just wouldn't be a good guy corporation. Network 23 would be fighting for legitimate bandwidth on something YouTube-like, and you could have people working within THAT company trying to allow them access and not throttle them down to, well, nothing (no Net Neutrality means that the YouTube expy has the right to shut them down if they want to). Reg's channel would be straight-up pirate, hacking their way into piggybacking on someone else's bandwidth.
Tech. Edison would obviously not be working with his big, bulky shoulder-mounted camera. It would obviously be a Google-glass-like face rig, although the camera would be mounted obviously so that people could see that he was a journalist. If he wanted to speak to the audience, he'd use a mirror.
And Max?
The same. Nothing really needs to be changed about Max. I mean, Max would actually be computer generated, rather than a makeup and camera trick job, but it would be a computer generated avatar of much, much lower resolution than the things which we are used to today.
So that's what I want. Anyone know who I should talk to in order to make it happen?