MacGyver - 'The Rising'

However cool these guys are, clearly they don't want to get that stuff on their
clothes.

Do you remember MacGyver? If you don't, congratulations; you're young, enjoy it while it lasts. Running from 1985-1992, with a couple of TV movies in 1994, it was an adventure show starring the pre-Stargate Richard Dean Anderson as Angus MacGyver, a gun-averse secret agent and one-man A-Team, who would resolve situations by using available materials to create impromptu tools and weapons with the aid of his trusty Swiss Army knife and roll of duct tape. It was good fun, and it ran for seven years, and the character came back to recover the lost treasure of Atlantis(1) and shut down a British-based nuclear arms industry run by the perfect neighbour from Ever-Decreasing Circles(2).

Anyway, in this age of remakes and reboots, someone decided that we don't have enough Anguses on TV these days, and so we have ex-X-Man Lucas Till taking up Mac's Swiss Army knife and leather jacket, accompanied by ex-Delta Force buddy Jack and hacker with a heart of gold Riley, as he sets out to avenge the murder of his girlfriend and previous hacker, Nikki by ex-Wimbledon midfielder Vinnie Jones in the cold open. Mac's team is part - or possibly all - of super-secret clandestine division the DXS, which masquerades as a 'think tank' and sounds like a courier service. Jack hits things and Riley hacks, while Mac makes things out of other things. To help us along, the show's twist on the formula is that Mac's process is explicated not just through voice over but through screen captions identifying the useful things that he sees.

Either that or he suffers from a bizarre form of synaesthesia in which he literally sees the names of things as labels. It's not entirely clear. Either way, it's not as cool as Cassandra's math-vision in The Librarians.

Picking a handcuff lock with a paper clip is probably really hard, but on T it's
pretty old hat.

'The Rising' sees Mac and his team trying to recover a biological warfare agent that was stolen from them after they stole it, presumably from bad people, although really all we know is that they appeared to be Italian. The shock twist is that Nikki turns out to be the mastermind (and not dead.) They prevent the release of the virus via IED, but the whole thing brings the agency into disrepute, leading to the rebranding of the DXS as the Phoenix Foundation. Nikki herself is arrested, but escapes thanks to Mac teaching her to pick a handcuff lock with a hair grip. Ah, the hazy flashbacks of romance.

So that's MacGyver 2016. Is it good? Not very. Is it bad? Not really. The cast seem likable enough, but I guess we'll find out if the show as a whole has legs. If it does, no doubt they will be usefully labelled.

(1) Spoilers: The real treasure was knowledge.
(2) Rose's dad in Downton Abbey for those too young and hip (or not-British) to know Ever Decreasing Circle.