Friday night has long been a television wasteland populated by rickety family comedies, tired genre fare, and Blue Bloods – which has been signing Tom Selleck’s paychecks for the past seven years and only your aunt Connie has noticed. This fall, Friday night gets a little bit of an update with two remakes, but both stick pretty close to what is already working on that night.
MacGyver is the perfect stupid Friday night show. I don’t mean “stupid” as an insult – quite the opposite. It’s the kind of show that you can half watch with a glass of wine after a long week at work while nodding off on the sofa … and the kind of show you can totally forget about watching when you wake up with the remote in your hand and greasy Chinese food containers on the coffee table on a Saturday morning after too many beers at happy hour. It’s engaging and fun and about as intellectually taxing as a dinner placemat.
Just like in the original, Angus “Mac” MacGyver (Lucas Till, blonder and twinkier than his forbearer) can make an electromagnetic pulse out of an extension chord, some old batteries and a door hinge, and find a way to open an electronic safe with a champagne glass and some wall plaster. Unlike in the 80s version he’s sort of a slick, James Bond type who works for the Department of External Services, or DXS, a secret government agency that not even the CIA knows about. At his back are Jack (George Eads), a wisecracking hunk of muscle, and Riley (Tristin Mays) a hacker he had to spring out of prison.
Their first mission is everything you would expect: trying to stop some shady arms dealers from selling a biological weapon, which also involves dismantling a bomb with a paperclip and creating a parachute out of a tarp and some zip ties. The particulars hardly matter on a show like this. You just want to watch a genius whiz around and come up with ingenious solutions for problems, which are cleverly explained by title cards on the screen and a sometimes-invasive voiceover.
Even though decades have passed, MacGyver is still good, clean fun, especially for those staying up late on a non-school night. It won’t change the TV landscape, but if you’re looking for something with chases and explosions you can watch while ironing and still follow the action then you could do a lot worse. (Like sticking around CBS for Blue Bloods.)
Fox has always had great luck with sci-fi shows on Friday nights, like The X-Files and Fringe, and The Exorcist fits in perfectly with that legacy. The big draw here is Oscar winner Geena Davis who plays Angela Rance, a Chicago woman who thinks that her house is possessed by demons and that her daughters (Hannah Kasulka and Brianne Howey) aren’t safe.
She gets the help of two very different priests, the young rising star Father Tomas (Alfonso Herrera) and the old pro at demonic possession Father Marcus (Ben Daniels). At first this seemed like just any other show about demons (Outcast, Constantine etc) with cheap, creepy scares like a crow that flies through a window pane and convulses and bleeds all over a copy of the Bible.
But the episode’s final scenes, with Father Tomas expressing doubts in his faith and a truly scary encounter in an attic (why do these people go in the attic?) turned it around for me. It hints that these demons are maybe a reflection of some psychological issues or a result of trauma rather than just devilish imps choosing their victims willy-nilly. Without giving too much away, it’s setting the show up not to be about two priests clutching crosses and shouting at demons over a bed each week, but a tricky cat-and-mouse game between an evil genius and the not-as-canny forces of good. I’ll sign up to watch that – especially on a Friday night.
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MacGyver premieres at 8pm EST on CBS. The Exorcist premieres at 9pm EST on Fox. Both shows start Friday 23 September
