![]() ![]() Other episodes deal with issues like broadcast violence (ratings-hungry networks present a deadly sport) and illegal downloading. The Max Headroom signal hijacking occurred on the night of November 22, 1987, when the television broadcasts of two stations in Chicago, Illinois, United States, were hijacked in an act of broadcast piracy by a video of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume, accompanied by distorted audio and a corrugated metal panel swiveling in the background to mimic Max Headroom's. In the episode “Academy,” the lives of citizens are broadcast on TV, their fates determined by audience votes-an anticipation of contemporary reality TV. 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. 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. ![]()
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