Synopsis

Known as "MacGyver" or "Mac" to his friends, Richard Dean Anderson stars as the brilliant secret agent Angus MacGyver whose main asset is his practical application of scientific knowledge and inventive use of every day items as well as his ever-present Swiss Army knife. Unlike James bond and other fictional secret agents, MacGyver refused to use guns and instead would find solutions to his problems using nothing but his creativity, often involving him devising brilliant inventions from what ever materials were available to him. One of the major appeals of this show was it's use of real scientific theories in MacGyvers applications, despite being fantastic and hard to believe, they were also often technically possible under the right situations.

The show often dealt with social issues in which MacGyver would battle injustice and always saved the day. So popular was MacGyvers appeal that a colloquialism appeared called a "MacGyverism" in which if someone "MacGyvered" a solution to a problem it referred to the way the star would jerryrig a solution quickly based on what was available. In the show MacGyver lived on a houseboat and was often employed by the American government and later by a mysterious organisation called "The Pheonix Foundation" along side his boss and best friend Pete Thornton (Dana Elcar).