MacGyver redefines the American hero archetype on September 29, 1985


WHAM! There it was! September Twenty-Ninth, Nineteen Eighty-Five! Another Sunday Night, another languid drift of the television dial, a ritual of the masses, a flicker of cathodic blue in a million darkened living rooms, and then—BAM!—a phenomenon, a paradigm shift, a veritable explosion of pure, distilled, all-American ingenuity, erupting right there on ABC! MacGyver had landed.

What was this? This MacGyver, this new television program on the third-rate-network-of-choice, ABC, in the autumn of 1985, arriving like some kind of strange CHEMICAL REACTION, a new concoction bubbling up from the cultural stew of the Me Decade? Here came this fellow, MacGyver, portrayed by Richard Dean Anderson, to make beta males great again.

That's right: pacifist MacGyver, with his aversion to guns and his bleeding heart for the environment, would defy the panoply of 80s action icons - the Rambos, the Terminators, the former cowboys-turned-presidents - and solve problems with brains, not bullets. And what a brain it was! MacGyver was something of a physicist, you see. And futbol americano, and even the American pastime, were not his games, oh no - here he came out of Minnesota brandishing a hockey stick.

A hockey stick, and a whole lot more.  

Duct tape! A paper clip! Chewing gum! Some loose pieces of stone! A coffee bean! A spring from the bottom of a rusty old bed! 

Make a parachute from rope and a tarp? Make it so! Use a chocolate bar to stop an acid leak? Why the hell not? Disarm a missile with a paperclip? Possible! Deflect laser beams with a strategically-placed mirror from a compact? Darth Vader's glove would turn green with envy!

It turns out, you didn't need steroids, big muscles, and big guns to be a Real American Hero.

But you did need hair mousse - and lots of it! MacGyver would grapple with Don Johnson for Best Mullet of the 80s as much as he grappled with the bad guys. His hairstyle wasn't the only icon launched by the show. Michael Des Barres would emerge as one of the great TV villains of all time, the devious Murdoc, who seemed to conclude his every appearance plunging to his supposed death screaming, "MAHGYYYYYYVAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!" And by the end of the decade and beyond, MacGyver would become a verb in the American lexicon for problem solvers in all fifty states.

MacGyver didn’t need a budget or a badge; he had ingenuity, that most American of virtues. And he had, arguably, the best TV theme music of the 1980s next to Street Hawk - and that's saying a lot.

In his aviator jacket, jeans, and sneakers, MacGyver was a hero who looked like he could’ve been your cool older brother, the one who’d let you finish his New Coke while he fixed the neighbor’s lawnmower. More than anything, MacGyver - the man, and the show - were selling swaggering optimism. Things were going to be okay. War and violence weren't the solution to the challenges facing us. We were up to the task, if we studied hard and used our minds. It was a sales pitch that spoke to the very American soul, a soul that was still a little bit of the pioneer, the homesteader, the patriarch, the hunter, the provider - the man who built his own house with his own damn hands.

That night, September 29, 1985, it all began with a spark, a flicker, a guy in a bomber jacket with absurdly-great hair promising America, “Trust me, I got this.” And America, sprawled on its couches, believed him. MacGyver wasn’t just a show; it was a state of mind for a new age of possibility. And after the TV was snapped off for the night, parents went to bed thinking their kids finally had a wholesome role model among all the other trash purveyors on the boob tube. And kids fell asleep thinking, "I will pay attention in science class tomorrow...and I will bring a paper clip and a stick of chewing gum!"

Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA

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