Advertised as "the first computer-generated TV presenter",[1] Max was known for his biting commentary on a variety of topical issues, arrogant wit, stuttering, and pitch-shifting voice.

Max was advertised as "computer-generated", and some believed this, but he was actually actor Frewer wearing prosthetic makeup, contact lenses, and a plastic moulded suit, and sitting in front of a blue screen.

[3] According to his creators, Max's personality was meant to be a satirical exaggeration of the worst tendencies of television hosts in the 1980s who wanted to appeal to youth culture, yet were not a part of it.

In the movie, Edison Carter (portrayed by Frewer) is a journalist fleeing enemies into a parking garage, crashing his motorcycle through the entrance barrier reading "Max.

The AI develops a personality identified as "Max Headroom", and becomes a TV host who exists only on broadcast signals and computer systems.

Channel 4 executives enjoyed Morton's pitch and introduced Max as a character in an hour-long TV movie before presenting him as a programme host.

[3] Producer Peter Wagg hired writers David Hansen and Paul Owen to construct Max's "whole persona",[8] which Morton described as the "very sterile, arrogant, Western personification of the middle-class, male TV host".

[3] Producer and character co-creator Annabel Jankel thought Frewer would be a good choice to masquerade as a person whose appearance was designed by a computer, seeing from his casting Polaroid photo that he had "unbelievably well-defined features".

"[11] While Hansen and Owen continued writing Max's lines in the TV movie and music video programme episodes, Frewer always improvised more dialogue during filming and was encouraged to do so.

[12] In discussing Max's fictional origin story, it was first proposed that he could be an AI created to stand in for a human TV host who was late for his own show.

[13] Max's image is actually that of actor Matt Frewer in latex and foam prosthetic makeup with a fiberglass suit created by Peter Litten and John Humphreys.

[13] Preparing the look for filming involved a four-and-a-half-hour session in makeup, which Frewer described as "gruelling" and "not fun", likening it to "being on the inside of a giant tennis ball".

[3] It consists of material originally planned to be broken into five-minute backstory segments for The Max Headroom Show, later expanded to one hour.

Channel 4 advertised Max as the "first computer-generated TV presenter" and Matt Frewer was initially under contract to withhold his identity in the role.

Rather than a music program, this is a prime time dramatic series based on the story and concepts of the original TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future.

[18] On 22 November 1987, an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume carried out broadcast signal hijacking of two television stations in Chicago, Illinois.

During each signal interruption, the hijacker speaks with distorted audio and stands before a swivelling corrugated panel to mimic Max Headroom's geometric background effect.

[22] Max made celebrity cameos and sampled appearances in other TV series, books,[23] the Art of Noise song "Paranoimia" and its video (which became a top-40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100),[24] and advertisement campaigns.

[11] After the two TV shows and the Coke advertising campaign ended, Peter Wagg attempted to sell a movie concept called Max Headroom for President but did not find a company willing to produce it.

[3] In 1986, Quicksilva released a Max Headroom video game, developed by Binary Design, originally for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and ported to the Commodore 64, Amstrad, and Amiga.

[25] In 1987, Comico announced a thirty-two page Max Headroom 3-D comic, written by Mike Baron and illustrated by Arnold and Jacob Pander[26] but the issue was never published.

Matt Frewer portrayed Max, with make up that showed the AI had aged considerably and was in ill-health, implying he belonged to obsolete analogue television and had no place with new digital technology.

[16] Matt Frewer played Max Headroom for a brief cameo scene in the 2015 movie Pixels, a narrative that featured many digital characters from 1980s video games.