[macgybl]

The Wonder Years was another show from that Period that used Narration as a character in the show. And I was listening to an interview that Dan Lauria gave and the execs said the same thing "there is no narration in television", the producers stuck to their guns and said they would sue them if they forced to have the narration removed. Supposedly "How I Met your Mother" does it now but I cant' confirm as I don't watch it.


I liked the anecdotes aspect of the narration and the situations where he would tell stories from his past or how he learned lessons and how they applied to the situation.

I think using the narration as a storytelling mechanism wasn't' necessary, but when they used the narration as a background info part it worked.

[MacGyverGod]

I think in The Wonder Years it worked great. Just as in Magnum. I think there's a whole diffirence of using voice overs to express feelings or to explain what you're doing.

That's what The Wonder Years was all about. How do you feel when you look back on your childhood?

Now on what I read here is they decided to stop the voice over in MacGyver as the audience would see what he was doing. Like I said earlier in the topic that worked for the first three seasons but not for later seasons.

Maybe it works some times but in case of MacGyver it was for the best of the show, they decided not to do it anymore. It was the right decision.

Now that I think about it maybe with exception of The Wonder Years, the use of voice overs seemed like an 80's thing that now seem to know a little revival? I don't know if there were any show in the 90's that did it. Could it be that the voice over was replaced by the main character addressing the audience by looking and talking in the camera like Zack Morris did in Saved By The Bell. The so called fourth wall breach?

[macgybl]

Yup, I think you're right. The Office is another show that addresses the audience.
Television has really gone around.

[KiwiTek]

Scrubs does it too.

I personally think the original reasoning is flawed to some extent because Television isn't just a visual medium, it's both vision and sound and showing a persons thoughts is really hard to do, which is why movie versions of books are never the same, because you don't get the "internalizing" (as it's called these days). Voice-overs allow for more much more information to be presented in a single scene than just image alone.

I think the voice overs worked well to help "show" us the thought process of MacGyver piecing together a MacGyverism (which is something RDA often commented on in his interviews) but also to give extra depth to the character and situation.

Also the fact that a number of shows still use them today indicates that they are not "a radio thing" as Greenburg and RDA called them.

[cirubit]

I always loved the voice over in Mac Gyver and I never accepted this fact.
It was a fundamental part of personality of Mac.

Without voice over the show had lost a lot of ironic.

[Traveller]

I agree with Cirubit. I think it was a shame they abandoned the voice-over. It added something special, it gave the episodes an extra 'bite'. RDA later said that they left the voice-over out because it wasn't necessary to tell what already was shown. But that was not what the voice-over did: it commented on what was shown, in a nice ironical way. It gave a twist to the things we saw. Example: remember the scene where Mac was staked out in the sun, in 'Golden Triangle'? The scene itself is quite heavy, but Mac's comment about his mothers broiled chicken gives it a nice levity.

I don't understand why RDA himself didn't see that. I suppose he was influenced in this matter by Michael Greenburg.

[MacGyverGod]

In the beginning it could've been fun. For the first two seasons, absolutely. It really was part of it but than it just lost its touch I think. For the third season it's acceptable but what was the point in the end of using it later on if it was just to introduce the audience into the episode. Of course his broiled chicken remark was indeed funny.

But in later seasons I can't see it work anymore. I mean imagine Mac explaining what he's doing while he's figuring out a way through Murdoc's wires in Stricktly Business. Or trying to get out of the gasfilled tank in Bitter Harvest or the incinerator in Jerico Games. It just doesn't fit the picture. It was outdated for the show.

[Traveller]

No, voice-overs don't get outdated, if used in the right way. Greenburg and RDA got tired of doing them, so they skipped them. Had they continued, I am sure they would have found the fitting moments for them. It's a matter of script writing. Once you do away with the voice-overs, you don't have to include them in your scripts anymore, which means you write your scripts differently. And that's why the scenes you mention, MacGod, don't require a voice-over anymore.