Well, I suppose there are worse Heros to emulate.
The show follows secret agent Angus MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, who works as a troubleshooter for the fictional Phoenix Foundation in Los Angeles and as an agent for a fictional United States government agency, the Department of External Services (DXS). 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. He favors non-violent resolutions and prefers not to handle a gun due to a gun death of one of his friends when he was 12.
His main asset is his practical application of scientific knowledge and inventive use of common items. 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 was praised for generating interest in the applied sciences, particularly engineering, and for providing entertaining storylines. All of MacGyver’s exploits on the show were ostensibly vetted by consulting scientists for the show’s writers to ensure a basis on scientific principles (even though, the creators acknowledged in real life one would have to be extraordinarily lucky for most of MacGyver’s ideas to succeed).
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