The New MacGyver

The Eighties was something of a Golden Age for me, we had Knight Rider, The A-Team, Airwolf, Stingray, The Equaliser, Hardcastle and McCormick, Streethawk and, of course, MacGyver. And I loved them all from ages 7- 12 you know the period you absorb the stuff you love. It may be that love is a little too uncritical but I don't care. Since then there have been shows that I’ve loved as much The Pretender, Vengeance Unlimited, Relic Hunter, The Sentinel, Bugs, Leverage, The Librarians, Arrow, The Cape, Burn Notice, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Person of Interest and I could keep going... And as is the way of things there have been attempts to revive some of these properties Knight Rider seems to get a new pilot or series every few years Knight Rider 2000, Knight Rider 2010, Team Knight Rider and Knight Rider (2008). There was an A-Team movie in 2010. Two Equaliser movies starring Denzel Washington. And I’m sure there are more to come. Which brings me to MacGyver. Richard Dean Anderson has revived the character a few times for commercials – Mastercard and Citan spring to mind.

He even appeared as MacGyver in a MacGruber skit as MacGruber’s dad.

Then there was the unaired pilot, MacGyver where a pre-Supernatural Jarod Padalecki, played Clay MacGyver the original’s nephew. This seems to be universally referred to as Young MacGyver Which brings me to the current MacGyver or NuGyver as I like to call him. The show is now at four seasons with a fifth on the way. I watch the show and my wife asked me what I thought of the show and I told her I still wasn’t sure about it. “You’ve watched how many seasons?” She asked. “Three” I said (before the fourth came out) “And you’re not sure. Riiiiiiight. Three seasons, you like it” So a little history would seem to be in order A pilot was shot in 2016, featuring a longer haired Till that was scrapped and reshot, I’m still curious about what was in that pilot (It’d be a nice special feature in one of the DVD sets – just saying) But they retooled it and reshot it and I’m not sure of the end result – many of the characters are callbacks or versions of characters from the original series which I can live with. Mac is still improvising his way out of situations and really that’s all I want but here’s the thing about the classic MacGyver – the show was about him, other characters came in and out and aside from Mac’s boss Pete Thornton there were no regular characters and a handful of recurring characters. In this iteration, Mac is part of a team. His boss was initially Patrica Thornton who was replaced by Maddie Weber, which I’m fine with (I won’t spoil why the change happened but they keep trying to hint of the same fate for Maddie which is an annoyance because I know they wouldn’t go to the same well twice). My big problem is the team and the size of it. Initially the team was Mac, Jack Dalton (Mac’s bodyguard) and Riley (a hacker) and I thought that was a bit big. Then they added Bozer, a childhood friend of Mac’s who initially didn’t know about Mac’s job at the Phoenix Foundation but soon joined the team. Then we got Samantha Cage an Australian psy ops expert but she left after one season, then Bozer’s spy school girlfriend Leanna Martin who lasted about the same time, Jack left and was replaced by Desi Nguyen and then in season 4 the Phoenix Foundation was bought by Russ Taylor.

If you think that’s a lot of characters you’d be right and the show has to give them all something to do which means that we get B plots of Bozer at spy school, Riley and the issues with her father, Jack Dalton find the guys who robbed him. Some episodes Bozer just stands there in the ready room with Maddie as the team is on a mission. I suspect that Cage and Leanna left because they had nothing to do but they keep trying to shoehorn in new regular characters. Riley’s hacking is almost as important as Mac’s improvisation and in a recent episode centred on Riley and her hacking had Mac stopping a nuclear meltdown with two jet skis relegated to a B Plot. I repeat the guy with his name in the title is relegated to a B plot doing the very thing we want him to do. And it’s not every episode but to give the characters space it means that the title character gets less space. In the next episode, Mac is out of action and Desi, Riley and Russ Taylor take on the brunt of the adventure with a showdown with the villains and a few “What would Mac dos”. Look there might be a reason why Lucas Till is taking a smaller role – I recall reading that there were on set issues which lead to health issues and I can’t begrudge him that. BUT his name is on the Title, I’m watching for MacGyver if he isn’t fairly consistently driving the A Plot then what’s the point? Knight Rider 2008 suffered from the same problem. Look, MacGyver is successful enough that it’s been renewed for a fifth season and I keep watching because of my love for the classic MacGyver but I don’t love it in the same way. It’s not MacGyver using his brains and ingenuity to save the day. Jack, or Desi, might punch the problem or Riley might hack it or Bozer, er Bozer might do something and Macgyver doesn’t feel the same. Back in the day MacGyver hated guns and when he punched someone he shook his fist afterwards because the punch hurt – it made the punch seem like a last option. Now Mac is okay with people using guns and he’s just as happy to hit someone. This a point Richard Dean Anderson made when he turned down a guest spot (I do wonder if the plan was for him to be Oversight, Mac's Dad.) I know I should judge it on it’s own merits but the producers want to trade on my nostalgia inviting the comparison. Perhaps if they called it Phoenix Foundation I wouldn’t be so hard on it. I watch the show and I may be part of the problem – the show gives me enough to remember being a boy watching the original to keep me coming back but It’s not the same. The nostalgia may give the show an extra notch or two in my ratings it’s better than Scorpion that had me hoping for some MacGyver/A Team style builds but never quite did. (A Scorpion/MacGyver crossover would have been fun) (A quick aside NuMac and Scorpion are in the same universe as NuMac crossed over with NuHawaii 5-0, who in turn crossed with NCIS LA. NCIS LA crossed with Scorpion.) There’s a story when Oasis released Wonderwall, a very 1960s Beatles inspired tune, someone asked George Harrison what he thought. George said that it would have been an average song back in the 60s but now it was a pretty good song. And that’s how I feel about NuGyver, it would have been an average show in the 80s but now it’s okay