The hair definitely looks more MacGyver like now and less like a teenage heartthrob.
MacGyver remake comes to CBS (Lucas Till, George Eads)
- Thread starter Aragorn
- Start date
He didn't want anyone to start calling him "George Eats".
Hm. It seems too self-conscious in the way the characters talk about MacGyver's improvisations. That's the problem with a revival of a cult classic -- they tend to ride too hard on "Hey, remember all these well-known characteristics/tropes?" rather than just letting them be there, or not be there if they aren't needed. Hopefully that's being ridden harder in the trailer than it will be in the actual show.
Also, I'm not sure how having a whole team backing Mac up fits with the premise of a guy who can think his way out of a problem on his own. I can see the logic of having a hacker, since computers are so much more integral to every aspect of life today, and Mac's mechanical skills and physics knowhow don't necessarily translate to hacking savvy. But I'm troubled by the bit with George Eads's Jack Dalton backing Mac up with a sniper rifle. The original MacGyver did his work without guns and usually without killing (though some villains got themselves killed, as fictional villains are wont to do). It'd be hypocritical if their version of "MacGyver never uses guns" comes with the modification "because he has a guy with a sniper rifle nearby so he doesn't have to." Although it could work if Mac argues with Jack over whether guns or lethal force should be used, if it creates conflict between them and gives Mac an opportunity to take a moral stand.
Come to think of it, "MacGyver on a team of agents" could be kind of like Mission: Impossible (the TV series) if Barney Collier had been the star. Barney was sort of the proto-MacGyver, the guy who came up with all the fancy inventions and gadgets the team used on their spy capers, and who occasionally displayed a knack for improvising with whatever resources were on hand. So if they're going for an M:I feel, that would be "very CBS" in a way.
Also, I'm not sure how having a whole team backing Mac up fits with the premise of a guy who can think his way out of a problem on his own. I can see the logic of having a hacker, since computers are so much more integral to every aspect of life today, and Mac's mechanical skills and physics knowhow don't necessarily translate to hacking savvy. But I'm troubled by the bit with George Eads's Jack Dalton backing Mac up with a sniper rifle. The original MacGyver did his work without guns and usually without killing (though some villains got themselves killed, as fictional villains are wont to do). It'd be hypocritical if their version of "MacGyver never uses guns" comes with the modification "because he has a guy with a sniper rifle nearby so he doesn't have to." Although it could work if Mac argues with Jack over whether guns or lethal force should be used, if it creates conflict between them and gives Mac an opportunity to take a moral stand.
Come to think of it, "MacGyver on a team of agents" could be kind of like Mission: Impossible (the TV series) if Barney Collier had been the star. Barney was sort of the proto-MacGyver, the guy who came up with all the fancy inventions and gadgets the team used on their spy capers, and who occasionally displayed a knack for improvising with whatever resources were on hand. So if they're going for an M:I feel, that would be "very CBS" in a way.
Your description is pretty good. It feels more like a M:I reboot with young people than a MacGyver reboot. When I saw the trailer, I thought "it's basically attractive young people doing action stuff". It does not feel like MacGyver to me at all. The original MacGyver never had a team with a sniper, hacker etc to support him. That was the whole point. He preferred to work alone and was good at taking care of himself. As a long time MacGyver fan, I am really disappointed.
Well, I wouldn't say that. No, Mac didn't have a regular team, but he wasn't a loner either; on the contrary, he was a gregarious person who had dozens of friends and allies, just not all at once. His standard MO was to get involved with the guest star of the week, either someone he needed to help or an old friend or colleague or a new friend he made along the way, and share the adventure with them. He had plenty of friends, just not ones he teamed up with every single week. The person he worked with the most often was Pete Thornton, who was usually his boss but sometimes more of a partner in the action. Jack Dalton was his disreputable old friend who kept dragging him into trouble. Penny Parker was a newer friend that he kept having to save from her own naivete. Nikki Carpenter was a fellow Phoenix operative who was briefly used as his recurring partner, though it didn't last long. And there were other occasional sidekicks or friends-in-need like his grandfather Harry, the various Coltons, Lt. Kate Murphy, the folks from the Challengers Club community center, etc. Not to mention all the one-shot guests that he ended up helping just because he saw they were in trouble.
If anything, that's my concern about the team-focused new version. In the original show, Mac's work was about helping people. He was emotionally invested in the guest stars he was helping, and so we were too. If the new show has most of the character interaction and emotional bonding taking place among the regular team, then it might mean there's less of a connection between Mac and the guest stars of the week, and that might diminish the sense of him as a good friend and neighbor who's out to help people.
Still, these are just concerns. I'm willing to give the show a fair shake; maybe they could make this new approach work, though it would be different from the original. There wouldn't be much point to doing a new version if it weren't different in some way. It's just a question of whether those differences are worthwhile. I'm not convinced that trying to do it in the style of a typical modern team-of-agents show is going to be worthwhile, but I'll give it a shot.
"loner" was probably the wrong word to use. He was not a loner in the personal sense, of not wanting friends. But he would often go into missions alone by choice. And I recall episodes where he would insist to Pete that he wanted to go in alone. Of course, there were plenty of episodes where they gave MacGyver a side kick or friend in need but that is not the same as an entire support team. So I think we are basically on the same page. This show seems to be changing a big element of the original show by making MacGyver part of a regular team.
This is what I see as one of the downsides of the modern preference for more serialized storytelling. It shifts the focus of the dramatic arcs from the guest stars to the main characters, and so the protagonists tend to be more preoccupied with their own personal problems than other people's problems. When they do try to help other people, it's usually presented more in terms of how those other people's problems happen to be coincidentally perfect parallels for whatever the main characters need to work through emotionally that week. So TV storytelling these days has become less about altruism and more about self-absorption.
The new trailer is certainly an improvement anyway. The jury's still out on if this will be good or not, but at least it doesn't look automatically awful.
If the show were not called "MacGyver", it'd would be fine. On its own merits, it looks like a fun, action packed show with some good character humor. The issue is really that it is trying to call itself MacGyver when it is clearly not.
That's too narrow. A lot of people insisted that Star Trek: The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine was "clearly not" Star Trek, but that was unfair. Something can be a reinvention while still retaining the essence of the original. Like I said, there'd be no point in ever doing a new version of a thing if you didn't change it in some way. So yes, things are different here, but that doesn't preclude the possibility that it could retain the essence of the original character and show alongside the new stuff. The trailers so far haven't given a lot of evidence of that, so I remain skeptical, but I'm not going to decide until I see the actual show. (After all, little can be conclusively "clear" about a 42-minute show based on an 80-second sample. That's like 3% of the whole, and that's assuming this footage is all from a single episode.)
I've seen this show! It's called <Scorpions>
Looks fun to me but I've never watched more than a few minutes of MacGyver. I've seen more MacGruber than MacGyver 
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Best MacGyver remake news yet: Amy Acker is in episode 2.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110419/
Can this be watched and enjoyed on its own?
Can this be watched and enjoyed on its own?
MacGyver is the only character from the series and nothing from the show is referenced, if I remember correctly, so I don't see why not.
There was at least one. I don't remember much, just the cliffhanger with MacGyver strapped underneath a Poe-esque pendulum. I should re-watch the show at some point.
Ah, yes, that was "Legend of the Holy Rose," the 5th-season premiere and the first of several installments where the show basically went full Indiana Jones. The show's other 2-parters were the 3rd-season premiere "Lost Love" and the mid-7th-season "Good Knight, MacGyver."
And the show may not have had story arcs in the modern sense, but it did have recurring characters and episodes that were sequels to earlier episodes. In other words, pretty much the same level of continuity as contemporary shows like Star Trek: TNG.