MacGyver just may be the reboot that saves television
But it probably won’t be, because rehashed content is not the future of TV
According to the Hollywood Reporter, CBS is rebooting MacGyver. Though typically we’d be skeptical of yet another take on an existing Hollywood property, it’s entirely possible that MacGyver will be just the thing to break out of the rehash slump. Here’s why: 1. James Wan, the brilliant Hollywood horror director who successfully helmed the most recent entry in the Fast and the Furious series, is attached to executive produce the project and direct the potential pilot, should the series development progress that far. Wan’s distinct visual style would inevitably be a stark departure from the CBS house style, an absolute necessity for the network to lure a young audience. 2. For all the reboots on previously successful TV products that Hollywood has attempted over the last decade or so, CBS has one of the few unmitigated successes in Hawaii Five-0. The show’s sixth-season premiere last month drew more than eight million viewers and also boasts one of the most effortlessly diverse casts on television. If a reboot on a previous TV property is going to be successful, CBS is as good a place as any. 3. All you need is to find an undiscovered talent with the charisma of a young Richard Dean Anderson. We humbly submit Josh Holloway. 4. If anyone is going to be capable of forcing America back into the ’80s model of TV consumption, it’s going to be MacGyver. He’ll have all those pesky DVRs and streaming options dismantled in no time. 5. Science is super cool right now. With The Martian earning $55 million (U.S.) at the box office, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson with a whopping 4.3 million Twitter followers and original recipe CSI going off the air, CBS has a ready-made hit in science-friendly MacGyver. Pitched just the right way, MacGyver could reinvent the action-adventure genre like CSI reinvented the procedural.
Although all of this may very well be true, it’s much more likely that MacGyver will not be the show that saves television, for one simple reason. 1. Reboots are not the future of television. Despite Netflix’s Fuller House and Fox’s Minority Report and NBC’s Heroes Reborn and ABC’s Uncle Buck and CBS’s Rush Hour, reboots are the exception to television success, not the rule. For every Parenthood that modestly succeeds decades after a successful film and failed television series, or Battlestar Galactica that reboots a schlockey TV series with a serious reimagining, there are dozens of failures. MacGyver won’t save television because television can’t be saved with rehashed content, no matter how hard Hollywood tries.