MacGyver (1985 TV series)

MacGyver is an American adventure television series starring Richard Dean Anderson and produced by Henry Winkler that ran from 1984 to 1992.

The series features the adventures of Angus MacGyver, a quiet former secret agent whose main asset is his ever inventive resourcefulness using an immense amount of scientific knowledge. This allows him to create an endless variety of unorthodox solutions, usually to escape/break into an establishment, such as juryrigged devices using the mundane items around him (with clear influence from the A Team).

These inventions have come to be nicknamed MacGyverisms and even lead to the verb, 'to macguyver' - to jerry-rig a solution (this word was used and possibly even coined in Richard Dean Anderson's current project, Stargate, in a postmodern moment when somebody complains to Anderson's character that he can't just 'macguyver' a solution out of thin air).