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.

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

These inventions have come to be nicknamed MacGyverisms and even lead to the verb, 'to macgyver' - to jerry-rig a solution. (This word was used and possibly even coined in Richard Dean Anderson's current project, Stargate SG-1, in a postmodern moment early in the series 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.)