Vote for why you think it jumped
Never Jumped
MacGyver: Social Worker
A Very Special...(Pete goes blind)
MacGyver dumps the Jeep for a pickup
Angus!
Shark Bytes
I wouldn't have said it jumped the shark, but some of the episodes haven't aged well. (such as an episode where he saves an Afghan family from an evil Soviet army)
I THOUGHT MACGYVER WAS AN AWESOME SHOW! IT JUMPED THE SHARK WHEN RICHARD DEAN ANDERSON QUIT THE SHOW. OTHER THAN THAT, I LOVE MACGYVER AND RICHARD DEAN ANDERSON IS THE MAN!
the 6th season is just terrible. Alien abductions, migrant worker issues, a flashback to goldrush era 1800s, a woman juggling episode, an episode where they "trick" is he pitches a ball to this guy and he hits a scoreboard and it disentegrates onto the car of a bad guy. the list goes on and on. 6th season is terrible.
While it had its moments, this show really had a whole lot of shark jumping moments. Some memorable ones (spoilers, of course):
- MacGyver designs and builds a gyroplane out of an old engine, bamboo, rope, and tarp within a few hours in a heavily guarded prison facility with nobody noticing, then flies the thing through a hail of gunfire and somehow, it works. That was when the improvised gadgets became less plausible and more just script magic.
- Murdock's first appearance was semi-plausible in how he escaped death. One could see him escaping to the basement of a collapsing building or jumping out of an exploding truck in time. But when they had him survive falling off a mountain, swimming through boiling water, and surviving a point blank grenade explosion, it became just a bit of a stretch.
- When half of the episodes started focusing on local neighborhood issues, such as deadbeat dads, extremist racists, and gangs.
- And the other half were based on hot button issues such as pollution, poaching, and corruption.
- The brainwashing episode.
- The amnesia episodes (although to be fair, at least it showed him actually suffering other negative effects, unrealistic as it was).
- The Christmas episode, which was just one long glurge. It was also around this point that the show had mutated to a point where Richard Dean Anderson was really the only recognizable element linking it to early seasons.
- The teen prostitution episode, where they specifically state that it was commissioned by the government and end with a hotline number.
- The rhino poaching episode, which opens with text saying that there will be a very realistic and brutal (but completely fake) killing of a rhino, then ending with Anderson giving a speech about the poaching of endangered species. It was near impossible not to laugh.
- The episode that explains his aversion to guns. It would have worked if there hadn't been a MacGyverism of him making a cart out of bicycle parts as his friend lies there dying.
- Actually, let's just say the show sucked after some point in the second or third season and leave it at that.
- And as if trying to top all of this, it ends with MacGyver finding out he has a long lost son. This is ironically funny because for all MacGyver did to preach about healthy living, it undermines it all by revealing that he had insufficiently protected, premarital sex earlier in his life. Whoops.
- MacGyver designs and builds a gyroplane out of an old engine, bamboo, rope, and tarp within a few hours in a heavily guarded prison facility with nobody noticing, then flies the thing through a hail of gunfire and somehow, it works. That was when the improvised gadgets became less plausible and more just script magic.
- Murdock's first appearance was semi-plausible in how he escaped death. One could see him escaping to the basement of a collapsing building or jumping out of an exploding truck in time. But when they had him survive falling off a mountain, swimming through boiling water, and surviving a point blank grenade explosion, it became just a bit of a stretch.
- When half of the episodes started focusing on local neighborhood issues, such as deadbeat dads, extremist racists, and gangs.
- And the other half were based on hot button issues such as pollution, poaching, and corruption.
- The brainwashing episode.
- The amnesia episodes (although to be fair, at least it showed him actually suffering other negative effects, unrealistic as it was).
- The Christmas episode, which was just one long glurge. It was also around this point that the show had mutated to a point where Richard Dean Anderson was really the only recognizable element linking it to early seasons.
- The teen prostitution episode, where they specifically state that it was commissioned by the government and end with a hotline number.
- The rhino poaching episode, which opens with text saying that there will be a very realistic and brutal (but completely fake) killing of a rhino, then ending with Anderson giving a speech about the poaching of endangered species. It was near impossible not to laugh.
- The episode that explains his aversion to guns. It would have worked if there hadn't been a MacGyverism of him making a cart out of bicycle parts as his friend lies there dying.
- Actually, let's just say the show sucked after some point in the second or third season and leave it at that.
- And as if trying to top all of this, it ends with MacGyver finding out he has a long lost son. This is ironically funny because for all MacGyver did to preach about healthy living, it undermines it all by revealing that he had insufficiently protected, premarital sex earlier in his life. Whoops.
The episode I most remember as having the show jump the shark involved Mac as a juror.
A crime is committed. A senile old woman witnesses it from her apartment window. The defendant is wrongly accused. The woman can describe the wrongdoer.
The Jump the Shark moment came when the woman used the term "African American man" to describe one of the characters she saw.
I find it difficult to believe that an elderly woman in the late 1980s or early 1990s, who insisted that her pet bird was the witness to a crime, would have had the political sensitivity to use the term "African American man."
That moment yanked me out of the episode and into the writer's room. I could almost hear the discussion on the need for political correctness.
The social worker/political correctness became unbearable.
MacGyver went from being the one man who could stop a nuclear power plant from exploding, to being a man thwarting a crooked owner of a baseball card store.
There was a great and entertaining fantasy in the juxtaposition of a man on a larger-than-life mission using commonplace tools.
Viewers were off to the inner chambers of a nuclear power plant on the verge of a meltdown, battling killer ants in a jungle, and escaping a paramilitary organization in hopes of returning to America. This was fantasy. This was adventure. This was big. This was escapism. MacGyver at the Challenger Club was ordinary and anything but escapism.
I don't become enraged when I hear the evils of corporations, or gentrification, or pollution. When MacGyver tried to convince me that I should, I found myself arguing him. I am supposed to root for MacGyver, not debate him.
Needless to say, the show became a heavy handed, politically correct message show. Escapism had -- well, escaped from the show. And the MacGyver character became less like a cool superhero, and more like a whining do-gooder.
I think this show is a great concept. I think it could live again. It just needs to stay true to the concept of extraordinary man in extraordinary situation using very ordinary means. I'll watch to be wowed. I'll not watch to be lectured at.
A crime is committed. A senile old woman witnesses it from her apartment window. The defendant is wrongly accused. The woman can describe the wrongdoer.
The Jump the Shark moment came when the woman used the term "African American man" to describe one of the characters she saw.
I find it difficult to believe that an elderly woman in the late 1980s or early 1990s, who insisted that her pet bird was the witness to a crime, would have had the political sensitivity to use the term "African American man."
That moment yanked me out of the episode and into the writer's room. I could almost hear the discussion on the need for political correctness.
The social worker/political correctness became unbearable.
MacGyver went from being the one man who could stop a nuclear power plant from exploding, to being a man thwarting a crooked owner of a baseball card store.
There was a great and entertaining fantasy in the juxtaposition of a man on a larger-than-life mission using commonplace tools.
Viewers were off to the inner chambers of a nuclear power plant on the verge of a meltdown, battling killer ants in a jungle, and escaping a paramilitary organization in hopes of returning to America. This was fantasy. This was adventure. This was big. This was escapism. MacGyver at the Challenger Club was ordinary and anything but escapism.
I don't become enraged when I hear the evils of corporations, or gentrification, or pollution. When MacGyver tried to convince me that I should, I found myself arguing him. I am supposed to root for MacGyver, not debate him.
Needless to say, the show became a heavy handed, politically correct message show. Escapism had -- well, escaped from the show. And the MacGyver character became less like a cool superhero, and more like a whining do-gooder.
I think this show is a great concept. I think it could live again. It just needs to stay true to the concept of extraordinary man in extraordinary situation using very ordinary means. I'll watch to be wowed. I'll not watch to be lectured at.
It jumped when MacGyver went from fighting world and international missions to...helping Jack Dalton.
MacGyver was a rather high quality show. Yes, some of the inventions he made were fake, usually on purpose, but some were absolutely true. By the way, sulfuric acid can be stopped by chocolate, the Mythbusters proved it, so there.
When this first came on, it was praised in the Reganomics Era because he didn't use a gun, which apparently most people felt there was too much gun violence on TV.
But if you really watch this show closely, some of the ways Mac devises to dispose of the bad guys are in fact pretty damn brutal. One episode he did them in by dropping a cargo container on them, another a guy wound up going out a fourth floor window. Without opening the window first.
Looking back, Mac was an inventive brutal thug. It probably would have been more merciful if he'd just shot the poor sod.
But if you really watch this show closely, some of the ways Mac devises to dispose of the bad guys are in fact pretty damn brutal. One episode he did them in by dropping a cargo container on them, another a guy wound up going out a fourth floor window. Without opening the window first.
Looking back, Mac was an inventive brutal thug. It probably would have been more merciful if he'd just shot the poor sod.
Best show ever!It was the show with a hero that all kids and adults should emulate if not copy the stunts.Anderson is a natural actor,personally a great guy and a looker.Parents should make a point out of letting their kids watch this show.Get it on DVD.It's reasonably priced.
Mac was AWESOME!!!! I think the best thing about this show let you imagation. I mean I know that alot of the stuff on the show was bull, but it was still. Richard Dean Anderson is a great actor and is still very handsom.
It jumped with Murdoc. Yet another show where their is a villain that never seems to get caught and never gets bumped off. Last time I saw this device used was in reruns of the TV series The Wild Wild West, where James West was never able to capture Doctor Miguelito Loveless.
MacGyver jumped when the Cold War ended. You really have to take the show as it is, which is pure escapism. MacGyver was sort of the television soundtrack of my youth. Although I didn't agree with all of his politics, I admired MacGyver's ingenuity.
Glasnost and the fall of communism killed this show. MacGyver was at his best the first few seasons when he was busy fighting the Eastern European/Asian/South American bad guys. But then the Soviet Union split up and the dictators all got overthrown. No more bad guys left to fight so MacGyver stays in California and does social work.
I think the shark started to circle somewhere in season 4 or 5. I loved the show when I was in middle/high school. By the time it went off the air I was a freshman or sophomore in college, and was basically like WTF. The Jeep was gone, Mac was living in the ghetto and working at a glorified YMCA.
Most of the science in this show was actually plausible, although completely far-fetched. But the writers really blew it in the episode about migrant farm workers and pesticides. Most agricultural herbicides are organochlorines or organophosphates: nerve gas, weapon of mass destruction type of stuff. MacGyver gets beaten up, and dumped in a field before the sprayers are turned on. Without a gas mask, this would be presumed to be fatal in less than 10 minutes. MacGyver survives with basically a headache. Unreal.
I think the shark started to circle somewhere in season 4 or 5. I loved the show when I was in middle/high school. By the time it went off the air I was a freshman or sophomore in college, and was basically like WTF. The Jeep was gone, Mac was living in the ghetto and working at a glorified YMCA.
Most of the science in this show was actually plausible, although completely far-fetched. But the writers really blew it in the episode about migrant farm workers and pesticides. Most agricultural herbicides are organochlorines or organophosphates: nerve gas, weapon of mass destruction type of stuff. MacGyver gets beaten up, and dumped in a field before the sprayers are turned on. Without a gas mask, this would be presumed to be fatal in less than 10 minutes. MacGyver survives with basically a headache. Unreal.
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