3 out of 5

Created by: Lee David Zlotoff

covers seasons 1 – 7

I know the little me who grew up on Macgyver may have claimed otherwise, but: Macgyver is an okay show. It’s frequently good, and its rewarding template – kept tight up through most of season 5 – can make it a great popcorn show, but there’s not enough story or character depth to really make it more than that, and its best episodes, of which there are many in the early seasons, are often countered by way over-moralization that made a lot of episodes cringey, even at the time. The theatricalness when the show is firing on all gears, though, is nearly unmatched.

Macgyver (Richard D. Anderson) is the jackest, jack-of-all-trades. Mush the bio of your action move ex-CIA, ex-Navy Seal, ex-Special Forces, etc. etc. badass with an earned-all-badges boyscout, some kind of renegade granola scientist from the counterculture, and a walking representation of a PSA, and that’s Mac, who works for The Phoenix Organization, a jack-of-all-trades “government” agency that seems vaguely philanthropic, but also apparently is who you call if you want to rescue a kidnapped government agent or dot dot dot, with later seasons pretense mostly being dropped, and The PO just kinda funds whatever experiment is the necessary setting for that episode’s scuffle.

Said scuffles, besides said kidnapping rescues, will involve some bad people’s of 80s enemy nations trying to steal The PO’s work, or Mac will stumble across some nefarious plot while tasked to some unrelated PO effort, or one of a small crew of repeat cast members gets into trouble and calls on Mac, and then the extra spice which made the show’s name into a verb: Macgyver will find himself in a tough spot, and use loose science to machine together bits and bobs on hand into a non-lethal solution, i.e. “macgyvering” a solution, which ends up being used as a term in-show as well.

But: if you’d guess that this would be a hard gimmick to maintain for 7 seasons of 22+ episodes each: yes! And not only does this amount to diminishing returns in that regard after about three seasons, but season five starts to get stretched very thin for justifying Macgyver’s / Phoenix’s place in any given matter, and the combination of that lets the show’s identity start to slip into something pretty this-could-be-most-show malleable. Still, Anderson is charming throughout – caveat below – and some of the aforementioned side cast, like Teri Hatcher and Bruce McGill and Michael Des Barres, are almost always guarantees of fun episodes.

The caveat to that charm, and the show’s gentle do-go charm, is when that swings into some of the most heavy-handed “the more you know” episodes about guns or drugs or racism, which is understandably part and parcel for the time the show was made, but is also often done with zero sense of the reality of these situations. Again: it came off as pretty silly, even as a kid.

When returning to a childhood favorite show, I try to ask myself: would I rewatch this again? Would I binge this? Does any of the behind-the-scenes I can now easily find out enhance the material? Honestly: these questions are each often an easy Yes when the show proves to be something truly enduring. But Macgyver qualifies more as nostalgia; it’s a quality show that existed at the right time in a much less crowded TV landscape, and earned a lot of a good will thanks to its “macgyvering” hook and a big-budget vibe first season. (I miss the opening gambits!) However, overall, it’s a mostly average affair, and lost a lot of its identity towards the last couple seasons.