I know we've had lists like this before for favorite, top 10 etc episodes, but this occurred to me on the way home tonight as I was thinking about which MacGyver episodes I've enjoyed watching lately.

SO... which episodes would you list as being your most watched episodes? Doesn't have to be in any sort of order, although you can order them if you wish.


My list would go something like this (not in any order)...

Runners
The eraser
Fire and Ice
Blowout
The Negotiator
Rock the Cradle
The survivors
Children of Light
Log Jam
The Endangered


What's your list?

Nightmares
Deathlock
The Negotiator
The Eraser
Back from the Dead
Serenity
Widowmaker
The Odd Triple
Wing and a Prayer
Brainwashed

Passages
Nightmares
Partners
The Outsiders
The Negotiator
Serenity
Legend of the Holy Rose- both parts
Faith, Hope, and Charity
Halloween Knights
Jack in the Box
Rock the Cradle
The Secret of Parker House

Ooo... my top 10 faves (in no discernable order...)

Nightmares
The Widowmaker
Faith, Hope, and Charity
Passages
The Eraser
The Challenge
The Madonna
Serenity
The Lost Amadeus
Lesson in Evil
Good Knight MacGyver

...oops, that's 11--just can't cut out the last one. It's the only ep I really liked in season 7.

doesn't have to be 10, just the ones you watch the most often, I just went with 10 because I had 10 to list.

In no particular order:

Blow Out
Jack of Lies
The Wasteland
Passages
Children of Light
The Invisible Killer
Secret of Parker House
The Madonna
Rush to Judgement
Bitter Harvest

The Widowmaker
Secret of Parker House
Passgers
The Challenge
The Negotiator
Fire and Ice
Unfinished Business

So many fun episodes....but my most watched ones are:

The Pilot (still like to watch that one at least a couple times a year)
The Guantlet
Nightmares
Fire and Ice
Widowmaker
Hell Week
Passages
The Negotiator
Cease Fire
Humanity

Pilot (my favorite! It just sets up the whole "adventure" theme of the first few seasons )
Every Time She Smiles
Secret of Parker House
Ghost Ship
The Gauntlet
....Uh...
To be continued..?

Feel free to comment and discuss the lists kids

I'm finding that after looking at all your lists mine is growing much longer.

Now that my brain isn't in "Lamaze Mode" I remembered a few more of my favorites.

Dalton, Jack of Spies
Three for the Road
A Prisoner of Conscience
Eagles (I lose it every time I see Mac in those horrible pants, but it's still a good episode.)
Jack of Lies
Good Knight, MacGyver

Some interesting choices, people!
It's odd, because I see some people listing some episodes that I actually AVOID watching. Guess it all goes to show how tastes can differ.
I was trying to think of my own list, but I actually don't rewatch the same episodes that many times, simply because then the episode gets boring to me. I prefer to dig around and pull out ones that I may have forgotten about.
And oddly, although it's a classic, I think I only watched the pilot episode once since getting the DVDs. It's not that I disliked it, I just never think to watch it. It somehow feels separate from the rest of the series, I guess.

To be in truth I love each one they made, maybe a few hear and there your questioning if it was good like in the seventh season, but over all I like all of them.

Yep, just about everyone here will say that even the "bad" episodes of MacGyver are better than a lot of the crap on TV these days, but even so, there will always be ones that appeal to your particular tastes more so than others and so given a choice you'll more likely to reach for them over one that doesn't particularly appeal to you.

Interesting comment from Miasma about episodes get boring if they are watched over and over. I've never actually found that. But I'm like that with movies too. Certain movies I can watch over and over and never get sick of. Just the way I am I guess.

Since I haven't watched like I used too ten years ago there are still my favorites.

Usually I'd go for episodes like Kill Zone, The Negotiator, Cease Fire, The Ten Percent Solution, Serenity, The treasure of Manco, Passages, Humanity, The Wall, Lesson in Evil, Obsessed.

But to be honest, I'm somewhat out of practice. During the summer I've watched like 70% of season 6 and on my birthday I've watched The Prometheus Syndrome again. The end of act 1 and act 3 are always doing the trick. Mac's hard breathing when he covers Earl's back with his jacket and than later when he realizes he fell into Prometheus' trap it makes me skin crawl everytime.

Excluding the crap known as "Good Knight MacGyver," of course! (tried watching it the other day, and I actually felt sorry for the cast.)

Actually, to be fair, even though I'm a child of the 80s, and I grew up watching MacGyver, I have to say that TV has gotten better, not worse, since then. Sure, I know there are too many reality shows, but many of the dramas on TV today are actually a lot better than the stuff that was shown in the 80s. Better acting, better cinematography, better music, better production values, better character development, etc. Shows like "Mad Men," "Soparanos," "Lost," "The Shield," etc, are all higher quality than what we would have seen back then. I think what peole miss, though, is the innocense of shows like MacGyver.

You didn't like Good Knight MacGyver?!

For as far as I know better tv from the 80's is in fact Magnum PI. When I started following it I had to say it was just the opposite of MacGyver. Just another regular guy. OK, he uses guns and he drinks and smokes cigars every now and than. But Magnum was in some ways different. Where Mac was neat and organised in his life, Magnum wasn't. He's sloppy, unorganized and he's the one asking constant favors from his friends instead of the other way around. Those are some things where I think Magnum was better than Mac. Other examples I can give were more unexpected deaths. You know where you know Mac would save the girl, Magnum wouldn't or couldn't. Nowadays you would know that, but back than... And also where Mac would've left the bad guy able to run, Magnum would've killed them. Maybe it would seem more like it when it involves enemies from 'Nam than from baddies he just met. In that opposite I think Magnum was much more daring than Mac for those days. The only negative point I can say about Magnum is that, though I'm only halfway season 6 (but it improved since season 5), there were too many episodes that seemed to go about nothing in season 2, 3 and 4. Season 4 was despite a few good ones about the worst season I've seen. Nothing beats the season 3 opener Did you see the sunrise?

This brings me back to what I missed the most on the Mac show and those where bigger storylines. More two-parters or season filled stories like on Xena or The Shield. A bad guy returning over multiple episodes in a season and more intense single episodes. Don't you think it would've been great that Murdoc terrorized a whole season with HIT and that Zito terrorized a whole season. Season 5 and 6 could've been greatly dominated by those two and still have their solid episodes like Halloween Knights, Serenity, Lesson in Evil, Stricktly Business and leave room for episodes like Passages. And you could've had Eric Cross dominating in the fourth season starting from Deadly Dreams. And season 3 could've had a great story arc involving Mac and Nikki with Deborah. A lot of missed chances maybe.

Sopranos with every second word being the F bomb and a lot of scenes involving half naked women is better quality?? Your kidding right?

But your thinking about it from what you know TV to be today, the bigger episodes wasn't normal TV back then, which is why there are so few of them and they occur in later seasons.

I don't even have TV; public, cable, dish, nothing. We prefer not to pay for crap we're not even going to watch. It's not such a distraction that way, either, which is nice. Ha...all I need is one more distraction in my life.

Actually, I really shouldn't have included THe Sopranos in that list since I personally never watched that one. I added it based on all the acclaim it received, and from what friends tell me about it. So feel free to scratch that one from the list of shows. I stand by the others, though.

But you raise an interesting point about another difference between TV now and TV in the 80s. In the 80s, they went more for "family programming," which meant everything had to be sanitized to the point of being fake. Villains would kill, but never curse, Mac never got laid (but always ate his vegetables), etc. Of course, not all shows fell into that trap as hard as MacGyver did, but things were definitely sanitized more back then. Which was great for kids, of course, but not as good for the adults, and it came at the expense of realism. These days, with a lot of dramas moving away from network broadcasting and onto cable, they break free of the FCC regulations, and they're allowed to be a bit grittier and more realistic. I'm not saying a show needs to have excessive cursing to be good, of course. In fact, I prefer that it's NOT excessive. But if it makes sense for a character to curse in the context of the show, then why not? For example, in the episode "Runners", we see a pimp who never curses. Seriously? It's totally out of character. Same with a lot of the Challenger Club episodes-- the kids are supposed to be street tough hoodlums, and yet they don't curse. It completely breaks the realism.

And as for nudity, the world won't implode if a nipple gets shown (actually, apparently the FCC thinks only female nipples have the ability to destroy the world... there's never hestition about showing male nipples. I mean, when you stop and think about it, isn't that a really random, silly regulation?)

I think FCC regulations are WAY too puritanical:
Cursing? Forbidden!
Female Nipples? Absolutely not!
Killing and beating each other up? Yeah, sure, no problem.

Is there ANY logic to that at all?

But moving on....

True, it wasn't the norm, but that raises another point. Longer story arcs and more in-depth character/plot development have become a norm these days, and that's another way in which televsion dramas have improved.
Take shows like "Lost" or "ER" or "Six Feet Under", or countless other shows that are more modern than MacGyver-- The way they're structured allows their characters to grow so that the character we see at the end of the series is not the same character we saw at the beginning. Things that happen in the show actually change the character, much like how we, as real people, change when things happen to us. On the other hand, in a show like MacGyver, he doesn't evolve. Sure, there are some subtle differences between Season 1 Mac and Season 7 Mac, but it's not from character growth, it's from the fact the the writers changed and the producers/network decided they wanted to take the character in a different direction. If the MacGyver series was made today, I bet we'd see more character growth. He might start out as the idealistic guy we saw in the 80s show, but I'd be willing to bet he'd change after all the crap he goes through with people betraying him, psychotic ex-girlfriends resurfacing, etc. That was one of the unrealistic elements of Mac-- no matter what happened to him (and PLENTY of stuff happened to him), it never really changed his attitude or his way of coping with things.

Anyway, sorry for taking this thread way off-topic! I'm not trying to start an argument, and I hope it doesn't seem that way. I just found it interesting when you mentioned that TV was crap today compared to what it was in the past. Like I said, I know there are too many reality shows, but if you push those aside, I think you'll find that there have been some really well-made shows in recent history.

Because of that it makes it bad?

So shows like The Sopranos, Entourage, Spartacus, Deadwood and Curb your Enthusiasm are bad because of the language and/or the nudity.

Of course, I don't know at what time it is aired there. If it's in the afternoon I understand the concern, if it's aired near 11 pm or later, I wouldn't know.

All I know it's aired on HBO and I heard HBO is known for less caring about the rules. In some ways I'm all for that. Why shy away from it? Protecting the kids from it is no use, they find out anyway one way or the other.

Who needs all that when you got internet?

True. A good example of that is The Shield. It's violent, it's gritty, but most of all it's a real and it's a show that was really pushed to an R-rating. If it was a movie it would've been an R-rating but I give it a PG-13 pushed to the top limits of near R. The whole vocabulary is in it without the F-bomb. Except for one occasion, but I have doubts it was the actually word because it was in a raised voice when one of the main character's CI's was killed. To me it either sounded as 'Christ' or indeed as the f word. It was subtitled like it. That and there's one incident in the third season called the raping. Wanna know how or watch the show or look it up on wiki. No reason to spoil it. But the fact they actually despite on occasion never used the f-word is that they kept the regulations in mind and not go too excessive. Because they already broke most of the rules.

That's true.

Maybe. If they kept writing the show the way it was in the first season, it would've been different indeed. I think Mac would've become like Indy in his last film. In the last film Indy had this 'been there done that' thing over him. So I think that would made him feel more at ease in situations of danger. Think the same thing would go for Mac. Depending again for what you choose to do. I don't think there ever will be a day Jack Bauer would feel at ease. Being on the run or living like a to-go-to guy in houseboat is something way different.

And somehow I think Mac actually did change his attitude and coping with things when he woke up from his coma. Maybe he accepted life even more or found a long lost peace with himself after he got the chance to tell his mother and father how much he really loved them and that he could finally say goodbye to them and to Harry.

Just try them and see for yourself. Just now today I was thinking when comparing old and new series. The bad guys have stopped making the classic mistake of wanting to get to the money or the treasure first and keep everything for themselves before killing the good guys. It's not about greed anymore which was often the case in MacGyver. How about killing Mac first before getting the money? Call Murdoc than, he's getting paid for it.

your right Rocky, tv show now a days really is just crap, there all the same like for example Warehouse 13 if you watched the old tv show Friday the 13th you will see things that are the same in both tv shows.

Yes.

They can't write good stories or intelligent dialog so they try to make up for it with cursing, nudity and sex. Non of which is the slightest bit entertaining. It also goes a long way towards the dumbing down of our society. We watch and accept programs like this and we become use to it and don't expect anything better.. Ergo our standards are subconsciously dropped, we carry those lowered standard into all aspects of our lives and suddenly replacing any sort of intelligent conversation with short fowl-mouthed remarks and thoughtful responses with violence becomes normal (as is overpoweringly evident in our younger generations who grew up watching this crap).

This may seem like an old fashioned prudish approach.. but I've watched the violence and crime increase in unison with the increase of it showing on TV and I believe there is overwhelming evidence that what we allow on TV is reflected in our society.

- end of rant -

..well, you did ask.

I'll bet good money that if you sit a cop down to watch that show, they'll say it's a load of BS. Even the fly on the wall cop shows like "Cops" isn't considered very real by real front line cops. What you mean is it meets your perception of real as prescribed by what you've seen in movies and TV shows.. non of which are true to life accounts of realism.

I completely and wholeheartedly agree, Rocky!

What I hate the most are all those shows like Idol, X-Factor or My Name Is... They're all the same concept. People who wants to become famous singers. Even if they won, once they've been in the spotlights with any luck for a full year, you'll never hear from them again. With some exception like maybe Susan Boyle or our own Belgian Natalia. But I don't think we'll ever find our own Kylie or Shakira. Peoples who make it to the top and stay at the top.

Well that's your opinion but I disagree. Who says they can't? Cursing, nudity and sex are just elements they added to it. Doesn't have to do anything with being able to write intelligent dialogue or not. Do you like Tarantino's films for instance?

I don't think we'll ever agree on this, Rock. To me they're elements. You can keep them out, or put them in. If you want them in, use them the way it's supposed to be. Can't make a horrorflick when there's nothing to see or an erotic thriller without sex in it. Ever seen an erotic thriller being PG-13?

My mother's like that too. Her biggest problem is over the top violence and nudity. She's always going: 'Do they really have to show that?' I say: 'Of course they do, because if they don't, it's no use of using it.' And when she doesn't make a fuss about it I go: 'You're not bothered by this?' Usually I say it to annoy her!

How much?

Did you ever see it? Probably not. Of course it's fiction but they tried to get it as real as possible. All the busts they did in the show were filmed documentary like and there's no use of music during the action scenes.

Your right we're never going to agree, also we should note that this isn't the right thread to have this discussion anyway, so best we try to head back towards that topic.

But you openly admitted that you don't own a television and don't have access to any current shows. So that's like me saying "I've never been to Seattle, and never met anyone from there, but I agree with somebody who says that people from Seattle are all rude."

Anyway, back on topic...

Haven't watched any Mac episodes for a bit.

I agree with an earlier reply: I can watch the episodes of the MacGyver series over and over again and and not find them boring.

We have to understand the context they were done in, the kinds of issues they addressed, and how tv was written and done in the 80s or 90s. In that sense, in my opinion there is not much point in comparing MacGyver to current tv shows because things have changed enormously and, after all, tv is entertainment, and more. I am a great fan of MacGyver, but I also never missed an episode of Lost desipte the fact that I never understood the ending!

Having said that, my opinion is that much, much of current tv is basically c..p!

Good points.
I guess it's also important to keep in mind that MacGyver was a kid's show, and there really aren't many of them left on primetime TV these days, so that also may make it unfair to compare MacGyver to current television.
For me, it worked out perfectly-- I was a kid when MacGyver aired, so I liked it, now I'm an adult, so I'm glad TV has also grown up. But I imagine it must be difficult for parents these days to find shows that they're comfortable letting young children watch.

As for Lost-- Yeah, I refused to miss an episode of that! In fact, I would not answer my phone while it was on. What part of the ending did you not understand?

Not sure how you qualify it as being a kids show. It was on in the prime-time evening family viewing timeslot. That's not kids programming.

A good point well said.