I assume whoever filmed this never saw the original. Aside from some names, and the explosion at the end of the credits, this doesn’t appear to have anything else in common with the older series:
Mac now happily uses his first name, and is some sort of horny James-Bond-like super-agent.
There’s now a ‘mission-impossible’ like team, including the required “type randomly for ten seconds” hacker-type who can do literally anything, using state-of-the-art 2793 AD technology.
The dialog! People don’t talk; they give speeches to each other. And not good ones.
Mac still doesn’t use guns (at least not for their intended purpose), but it’s for pragmatic “I can’t have one found on me” reasons. And they walk back even the not-using-guns part by having a sniper (!) team member follow him around and do all the shooting.
The “gadgeting” is just short of magic.
Basically all of the humor is gone.
No way this gets a second season. Anybody else want to pile on?
Never cared for the original, which always had a sort of half-right vibe. (I recall one where he cobbled together two receivers so they could triangulate a signal about ten miles away… and used about a five-foot separation to do it. Which maybe commercially-made [or military] gear could do, but not two antennas made out of popsicle sticks and duct tape.)
Now let’s be clear: the original series isn’t a masterpiece of television (particularly in its later, overly-preachy seasons where the handyman-gadgeting got replaced by the cause-of-the-week).
But it was basically human-scale - MacGuyver was trying to save a family, an individual, prevent a personal injustice, maybe save a facility, that sort of thing. And it highlighted a relatively non-violent notion that science and thinking could solve problems that guns couldn’t. Sort of a more approachable, everyman Doctor Who.
There’s none of that here. I suspect the death toll in the first episode of the reboot is comparable to the entire previous series. Violence is the method of first, second, and third resort. The story’s a vague weapon-of-mass-destruction bio-terrorism thing straight out of James Bond (with obligatory team-member-betrays-team sub-plot) and a badly-cast Gareth-from-Galavant as the bad guy.
At one point the bad guys kill off a bunch of scientists in Iceland as a proof-of-concept. In the old show, that’s who Mac would be saving. In this show, it’s just a toss-aside “oh, the bad guys are bad” bit that doesn’t even get mentioned again.
Yeah, the gadgets in the original were often implausible or just plain wrong (no, you cannot use the lenses from a pair of binoculars to start a fire twenty feet away, no matter how good the lenses or your engineering are), but fairly often they were also right, or implausible only in their precision (when you’ve got a timer for your trigger based on melting ice, you’re not going to be able to predict to the minute when it will go off). Chalk it up to having different writers.
And to be fair, the original Macgyver was an agent of some unspecified federal agency, and his adventures did often include international espionage. But that doesn’t mean that that’s the aspect of the character you should focus primarily on.
Hollywood TV executives are absolutely terrible at their jobs. This is why they keep trying to spit these same shitty shows back at us every decade or so, demonstrating a complete misunderstanding of both their audiences and the history of their medium.
I’m not making any judgments on MacGuyver, the original nor this one which I have not seen, but the fact is, the vast majority of all TV shows ever produced are utter garbage. The only reason anyone ever watched any of that shit is because we only had 3 channels; you didn’t have any choice. You watched whatever sucked the least out of the 3 options you had. Now, while a handful of quality shows managed to make it on the air every now and then, the Knight Riders, Fantasy Islands, and Love Boats were not among them. Why in the world do they think anyone would want to watch that bullshit now when we have over three hundred alternatives?
That’s pretty close to what my wife said: “Hey, that would have been OK if they’d just named it something else and not tried to make it a MacGuyver remake.”
I liked it when the boats collided and exploded in a massive (even by Bay standards) explosion.
I don’t think even a second episode could top that - so I won’t be watching, as I don’t want to be disapointed - hell, even ‘Scorpion’ is a bit smarter than this one.
The charm of the first one was also MacGyver - the character. The human scale of the show has already been mentioned, but don’t forget the human dimension of Mac himself: sort of goofy, self-deprecating, charming, stubborn.
Does the new MacGyver offer any of that same humanity?
Quite the opposite-the new “Mac” is an adrenaline junkie with a personal sniper to back him up when he screws the pooch. Never have I been so disappointed in a show I was looking forward to.
I don’t know how close that actually is to what I said: I may be misinterpreting but, from my POV, that sort of implies that, if I had watched the original, that I would have an objection to the remake, largely on the strength of it being a remake (“ruining my childhood,” and whatnot).
If anything, I’m the guy who often likes remakes better than the original, especially if it’s a remake of something from before I was born, or when I was young, because I really like the idea of seeing them execute an old premise with modern technology/less hokey dialogue/more diversity/etc.