CMac wrote:If anyone does watch it, please let me know what you think. I'd be curious to know.
I watched "MacGyver." But what I saw was "Mission Impossible." A team of specialists - the politically correct female boss, the problem solver, the military weapons expert, the tech wiz - all working for a secret government agency to bring down international bad guys with lots of shooting and explosions and a plot twist that was apparent from the beginning.
The whole point to MacGyver was that he worked ALONE, that he avoided guns, and that even though he used as much technology as was available in the 80s, most of his solutions were simple and low-tech and more often than not surprised even himself. He didn't have a back-up team - he WAS the back-up team. He didn't go into a situation with a cocky smile, confident that he could solve any problem, and he would NEVER indulge in self congratulations and high-fives.
None of the characters resembled in any way the characters whose names they borrowed from the original (Jack Dalton ex-Delta Force and weapons expert, really??). There's more to MacGyver than a Swiss Army knife. Even the MacGyverisms that they included in the pilot episode were not original - the real MacGyver had used the fingerprint trick, the plaster dust trick, and the muriatic acid trick 30 years ago.
A part of me was hoping that it would turn out to be a nice little homage after all, especially since the producer and director kept saying in so many interviews that they wanted to be loyal to the tone of the original. But there was no homage. It felt as if the message was that in today's world a loner who relies on ingenuity and heart couldn't make it on his own, and so he needs a team behind him to run surveillance and blow things up.
If they had promoted it as a Mission Impossible kind of show about a team that uses some MacGyver-like strategies, I might have given the show a chance. It might have even been successful. Scorpion does it each week. But this was not MacGyver.
Kate