MacGyver

MacGyver is an American adventure television series starring Richard Dean Anderson and produced by Henry Winkler that ran from 1985 to 1992 on the ABC network, mostly filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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, and usually his Swiss Army Knife. This allows him to create an endless variety of unorthodox solutions, usually to escape/break into an establishment, such as jury-rigged devices using the mundane items around him (with clear influence from The A-Team).

These inventions have come to be nicknamed MacGyverisms and even led to the verb, 'to MacGyver'. (This word was used and possibly even coined in Richard Dean Anderson's current project, Stargate SG-1, in a postmodern moment in the first episode, when a character – not Anderson's – comments on the time and effort that had been required "to MacGyver" a replacement for the Stargate's long-lost control system.)

MacGyver is an unusually principled action hero in that he refuses to carry or use a gun, is a vegetarian, and prefers non-violent conflict resolution wherever possible.