Today’s blockbusters strive to mimic reality with seamless computer-generated imagery, but for one defining television chatterbox of an earlier era, the resemblance went in the other direction. Max Headroom, the slick yet glitchy talking-head of the 1980s ABC series, looked like an early computer animation come to life: a chiseled-face plastic man in shades and ultraflat suit, jabbering in front of shifting geometric rays that evoked a broken television (or the arcade game Tempest).

Max was really an actor wearing prosthetics, and that illusion epitomizes the television-mad future in the show. The series, to be released on DVD by Shout! Factory, follows Network 23’s star reporter, Edison Carter (Matt Frewer, who also played Max), through a corporate-ruled wasteland where new technology begets new forms of abuse. The show, datelined “20 minutes into the future,” stirs together future-shock speculation with contemporary influences: roving live broadcasts, cyberpunk, MTV, camera-ready Reagan-like artifice, television evangelism, video art and the thousand-channel universe.

America is the usual representative for such dystopia, but Max was born in Britain. He first appeared as the sassy host of “The Max Headroom Show,” a music video series on Channel 4, at the time a fledgling network. His “Blade Runner” meets “Network” back story had been detailed in a lavishly produced introductory telefilm: after an accident, the telejournalist Edison’s personality is downloaded to a computer as a precaution.

Max, the stuttering result, largely owed his distinctive Teflon new wave look to the influential commercial directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, self-described former punks who had created shape-shifting videos for Elvis Costello and Miles Davis. Even on the music video show, the self-conscious satire was already apparent.

“One of the hilarious things for me was when we said Max’s favorite hobby was golf, and you look at this guy with no arms or legs,” said Peter Wagg, a producer, who had paired Jankel and Morton with a sci-fi-obsessed copywriter, George Stone. Max would eventually embark on interviews (starting with an amused-looking Sting) and a version of the music variety show broadcast in America on cable.

But on the story-driven ABC show, Max is the naive, nutty sidekick to Edison. The guerrilla-style reporter uncovers 21st-century crimes of commodification: a rogue outfit marketing dreams; terrorists pre-selling coverage of bombings; deadly compressed television ads (“blipverts”). Edison is in the mold of a white-hat journalist whose popularity deflects demands from a board of directors and a station producer, Murray (Jeffrey Tambor). The knockout keyboard jockey Theora (Amanda Pays) guides him via video links and satellite views (vector-drawn, not Google Earth).

Edison’s visits to desolate demimondes and Max’s virtual existence bear the clear influence of cyberpunk. Theora and Network 23’s in-house boy genius, Bryce (Chris Young), navigate interconnected data systems that recall William Gibson’s 1984 novel “Neuromancer.”

“I loved ‘Max Headroom,’” Gibson (who did not write for the show) wrote in an e-mail. “It made me hugely optimistic for where that sort of material could go, at a time when very few things did. Simply the fact that it could be so gleefully if darkly funny confirmed something for me.”

Some of that comic relief comes from what the show calls “blanks” — off-the-grid people with (to borrow the title of Gibson’s coming novel) “zero history.” Reg (William Morgan Sheppard) and Dom (Concetta Tomei) run a pirate television station out of a bus and play Edison’s informants with muted camp. The mohawked, British-slang-spewing Reg is, true to the show’s origins, an aging punk.

“I based him on an ex-paratrooper,” said Sheppard, who performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Peter Brook before a long career as a character actor. “There are a lot of guys like that. They come out of a war, and went punk.”

But the show’s mind-set is rooted in a pre-Web age still dominated by television. At times the biggest special effect is Edison’s one-man broadcasts, which he shoots with a decidedly unminiaturized shoulder-mounted camera. Max is less a figure representing artificial intelligence than a parody of television-made man: lacking memories before his creation, he quotes “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” and “Casablanca,” thinks the violent star of Network 23’s “Missile Mike” show is an actual psychotic, and all the while clucks, sighs and charms like a preening host. (The goal, Wagg recalled, was “a mid-Atlantic combination of Johnny Carson and all the famous hosts for TV shows.”)

Despite its innovations, the ABC show was abruptly canceled in 1988. These days many remember Max for flogging New Coke, a fate that harks back to the advertising backgrounds of the catchy character’s creators. A few years ago he even resurfaced, older and bitter, on Channel 4 to promote new digital programming.

Movies were in development after the show’s cancellation, Wagg said — first at Columbia, then Warner Brothers — but these fell through.