I love Martin Short’s “Jiminy Glick” of course, but you have to be plugged in to the early days of TV to really get the genius behind it, but for my money an actor essaying a bit in real life will never be topped by Matt Frewer as Max Headroom. Starting as a video DJ and then getting his own movie, then a Cinemax talk show that Space Ghost and Jim Carrey ripped right off, every body knows him from either the ABC show or as a New Coke pitchman and that sounds like damning with faint praise but think about how wide they took that character.
The ABC show? They altered the focus of their scorn from Thatcherism in the Channel Four version to the outright disdain of capitalism, so actually becoming an IRL pitchman for a blipvert was Ourobouros-level irony-devouring-itself that’s a scene that only lasts as long as it does. But it was glorious.
Forget the crazy rights-issues, I’m not sure you can bring this character back in any significant way because real life is way more cyberpunk now as to make these 80s explorations of tech run rampant almost quaint. Ready Player One was received with kind of a ho-hum because it was just a Spielberg version of Pixels. And it suffers a little in the comparison despite the lead going on a date dressed as Buckaroo, Pixels had actual Max Headroom in it.
Anyway, Matt Frewer is a genius.