Edison Carter

Max Headroom

I would not suggest that Max Headroom's Edison Carter changed my life. I was 15 when the show premiered; change was afoot regardless. But there were certain resonances involved.

Edison Carter -- for those of you who weren't watching, which was probably most of you, given the ratings -- was a reporter for the globe-spanning Network 23, and the human counterpart (twin? father? science fiction beggars genealogy) to the computer-generated Max Headroom. He was tall, angular, ironic; I was tallish, bony, and working on my irony. He flirted easily with his luminous British assistant, Theora Jones; I flirted awkwardly with --

But what mattered was what he did on the professional side. There was never a real TV newsman like Edison Carter; real TV reporters are cowards and idiots. He was, instead, the embodiment of the medium's unrealized promise, an old-time newspaper reporter freed from the constraints of deadlines and editors and ink-onto-paper-onto-delivery-truck. He set his own agenda. Nobody asked him to consider the advertisers' point of view. He got wind of the story and, long coat flapping, he leaped on his motorbike and hunted it down: tracked the sources, invaded the inner sanctums, leveled his yard-long camera at the truth, and -- LIVE AND DIRECT -- there he was, on the airwaves, without a net, interrupting the regularly scheduled programming to right a wrong, clear a name, expose malefaction at the highest levels. The wicked quailed; the mighty fell; the world watched, rapt.

That is, the fictional world watched, rapt. Out in Nielsen's America, nobody else seemed as impressed as I was. ABC killed the show in its second season, sticking it in a Friday-night slot that guaranteed the youth audience wouldn't be watching. But I didn't much mind. Wrapped in my new long duster coat, I was busy taking over the school paper.

-- Tom Scocca