Max Headroom: The wiseass AI who hacked his way into America's heart

One week a month, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new show coming out that week. This week: The return of Black Mirror has us thinking about TV's other visions of ominous futures. Not long after C-3PO and R2-D2's scene-stealing turns as the Bert and Ernie of the Star Wars universe, wise-cracking artificial intelligence became a standard feature of science-fiction film and television. Short Circuit had El DeBarge-loving military'bot Johnny Five, Knight Rider introduced droll Trans Am KITT, and who can forget Rutger Hauer as that barrel of laughs who saw attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, Roy Batty? But they all paled in comparison to Max Headroom (Matt Frewer), a chattering combination of prosthetics, post-production monkeying, and screen-saver-worthy animations. In the mid-to-late '80s, the glitchy talking head in the Klaus Nomi threads became ubiquitous through sheer versatility: He was a VJ, the face of New Coke, and, for 14 episodes broadcast on ABC between 1987 and 1988, the namesake character of a cyberpunk thriller set in a dystopian future where it's illegal to turn off a TV.