As regular readers of The A.V. Club’s Wiki Wormhole know, the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion is one of the great enigmas in the brief history of tech-savvy doofuses messing with the rest of us. To this day, questions surround the identities and the methods of the culprits who brought a few seconds of masked chaos and light spanking into Chicagoland living rooms in the fall of 1987.
The hijacking forms the basis for the latest episode of Unknown, the Super Deluxe series devoted to exploring and illuminating the unexplained and possibly apocryphal. Like an Unsolved Mysteries for stories you first stumbled upon on a message board at 3 a.m., Unknown revisits the incident and talks to one of the broadcasters who was on the job that night, injecting audio from an interview with WGN sportscaster Dan Roan. The episode makes no new conclusions about who the hijackers were, but whoever and wherever they are, they’re probably doing their best Max Headroom cackle, secure in their continued ability to generate headlines nearly 30 years after butting in on Bears highlights and a Doctor Who serial.