Max Headroom was a mid-80s television project by husband and wife filmmaker duo Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, who you might know as the directors of the first Super Mario Bros. movie. (Remember their names; there'll be a quiz later.)
Max Headroom's aesthetic went on to foundationally influence how we portray "glitchy" characters in film and games, but β stay with me here β the writing was indirect and overshadowed by the powerful aesthetic, and as such the underlying message they wanted to convey with this character would go clear over seemingly everyone's heads for decades... until 2020, when a YouTuber named Space Feather made this video essay β I mean it, stay with me β with a correct interpretation of this mysterious character that finally got everything about him completely right:
I'm able to say this about it because Annabel Jankel said so:

I'm not aware of any other video essay about the subtext of a piece of popular media being ignored or misinterpreted by the masses, whose original author has subsequently rolled up in the comments and given the essayist an unambiguous "thank god, someone who gets it." (If you are, let me know in the comments below, and be sure to like and follow.)
At the end of the essay, Space Feather laments that there's not a Max Headroom for current year. Where the original was very sharply satirizing the local maxima inevitable to television-centric culture (chiefly late night talk shows and what human attributes are considered acceptable for a TV star), maybe a modern day one would criticize the downstream results of the techniques corporations use to prey upon our minds on today's internet.
Well, three and a half years later, it seems Space Feather took matters into their own hands, creating the character Kernel Panic and applying this understanding of Headroom's intended subversiveness to comment on subjects from algorithmic radicalization, to how streamers feel a need to constantly fill the air, to insincere YouTube ad reads.
(flashing lights warning on the videos in this playlist)
