Twenty Minutes Back Into The Future
Charlie Jane Anders wonders what well-known franchises people would reboot. It reminds me that at least a decade ago I’d mapped the basic premise for a Max Headroom reimagining.
Edison Carter as a washed-up has-been who used to be a preeminent journalist with an Edward R. Murrow sort of reputation; it’s anyone’s guess which came first: the public giving up on him or her (I’d played with the gender of several characters, I think) or him giving up on the public.
Max Headroom as an upstart Jon Stewart-style personality whose scathing, no-bullshit approach might not be recognized by the industry as “journalism” but is doing more to inform people than most journalism. I’d given some consideration to Max possibly not being the same gender as Carter despite being recognizable as having been generated from Carter’s mind.
Blank Reg more or less would be just like the original, except he’d be played by Mark Sheppard as a nod to the original, played by his father.
No pun intended but at the moment I’m blanking on my plans for the Theora and Bryce characters.
Rather than trying to re-envision what media would be like “twenty minutes into the future” from now, the design of the world’s technology would be the same as the original series, because I thought keeping it at an alt-future-history distance would help the storytelling rather than getting bogged down in trying to design something based on today’s world.
Maybe Carter’s video camera would be more handheld than shoulder-mounted, but that’s about as far as it would deviate. That said, Max would be motion-capture rather than, you know, a plastic jacket and hair.
They’ll reboot Max Headroom someday, and I’ll probably hate it because I’ve lived with this basic idea for ten years or more.