MacGyver is an American action-adventure television series created by Lee David Zlotoff and starring Richard Dean Anderson as the title character.

The series follows the adventures of Angus MacGyver, a secret agent armed with remarkable scientific resourcefulness to solve any problem out in the field using any materials at hand.

Educated as a scientist in Physics at Western Tech ("Hell Week"), MacGyver served in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Bomb Team Technician/EOD during the Vietnam War ("Countdown").

Resourceful and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of the physical sciences, he solves complex problems by making things out of ordinary objects, along with his ever-present Swiss Army knife, duct tape, and occasionally matches.

The clever solutions MacGyver implemented to seemingly unsolvable problems‍—‌often in life-or-death situations requiring him to improvise complex devices in a matter of minutes‍—‌were a major attraction of the show, which helped generate interest in the applied sciences, including engineering,[3][4] and for providing entertaining storylines.

[5] In the few cases where MacGyver used household chemicals to mix poisons, explosives or other items deemed too dangerous to be accurately described to the public, details were altered or left vague or an essential component or step was omitted.

[6] The show often dealt with social issues,[7] though more so in seasons 4–7 than 1–3, which were mostly about MacGyver's adventures working for the United States government and later for the Phoenix Foundation.

While creating the series MacGyver, John Rich was working on the sitcom Mr. Sunshine for ABC, which was short-lived and cancelled quickly.

In season 3, he moved onto a houseboat at an unspecified location, though implied still to be in Los Angeles (the actual shooting took place at Coal Harbour, near downtown Vancouver).

After the twelfth episode of the season aired on December 30, 1991, MacGyver disappeared from the ABC schedule and did not return until April 25, 1992, by which point the series had been canceled.

Alongside local syndication, reruns aired on the USA Network from 1990 to 1997, on WGN America from 1998 to 2002, on TV Land from January 2003 to 2006, on Spike for a brief time in 2005.

[32] On January 13, 2015, CBS Home Entertainment announced they would release a repackaged version of the complete series set on DVD in Region 1, at a lower price, on April 7.

[33] In June 2018, CBS announced that the original camera negatives, thought to be lost, had been located and a high definition remaster of the series was underway.

The sisters' regular viewing of the show is an unalterable element of their daily schedule to the point of death as demonstrated in the episode "Black Widower".

In it, he manages to cut the ropes binding him to a chair using a pine tree air freshener, uses an ordinary tube sock as the pulley for a zip-line, and somehow repairs and hot-wires a nonfunctional truck using a paper clip, ballpoint pen, rubber band, tweezers, nasal spray, and a turkey baster.

In contrast to previous MasterCard commercials showing people making extravagant purchases to accomplish some mundane task, MacGyver is portrayed as escaping from some sort of deathtrap using less than $20 worth of common household items.

The commercial ends by showing him purposefully buying an assortment of such things at a department store with his credit card (as a tongue-in-cheek explanation for how he seems to always have items he needs on hand no matter where he goes).

[39] In an August 2007 survey commissioned by the McCormick Tribune Foundation, Americans polled voted MacGyver as the favorite fictional hero they would want to have if they were ever caught in an emergency.

He creates inventions from simple items to solve these problems, relying on only a Swiss Army knife and duct tape, instead of high-tech weapons and equipment like typical secret-agent show characters.

A 3D puzzle game based on the TV series titled MacGyver: Deadly Descent was released on iOS and Android.

[55] Anderson reprised his role as MacGyver in September 2012 in a new series of short films, created by Mercedes-Benz for the launch of their new MPV Citan in Europe.