The Worst Job I Ever Had in Television – News From ME

Josh Smythe wrote to ask…

A long time ago on your blog, you mentioned working on the original version of the TV show, MacGyver. You indicated it was not a happy experience but if you’ve ever given a real explanation as to why, I missed it. Is it too unhappy a memory to share it with us? Were you fired or did you quit?

I’m not entirely sure. I think I quit just before they fired me but it might have been the other way around. All I’m certain of was that I didn’t fit in with the folks running the show and I couldn’t wait to get outta there. No, let me amend that. One of the producers of the show was Henry Winkler and we didn’t have much contact but what there was was very pleasant. It was the rest of the management there I didn’t get along with, particularly the line producer.

He was (I thought) making a lot of mistakes and blaming them on everyone but himself. He’s dead now but I’m sure that if you’d asked him, he’d have had a very different assessment of who did what. I usually get along great with everyone I work with but once in while, you run into someone with whom you just can’t co-exist.

I was there for, I think, four weeks and we were prepping the first scripts for the second season. There was a whole list of things that someone or several someones felt had to change about the show and much of my time there was spent in meetings about how to make those changes and take the show in a “new direction,” story-wise. The other goal was that they wanted to drastically increase the stunts and action and chase scenes and the blowing-up of stuff while at the same time lowering the production cost of each episode.

At one point, I was assigned to watch reels of action scenes from other Paramount shows and movies. The goal was to come up with storylines where we could use some of that footage and edit in shots of MacGyver to make it look like he was involved in those chase scenes and explosions. I never found anything that I or anyone else thought would work.

Mostly, I did rewrites on scripts by others and wrote one script that was kind of like a pilot for taking the show in that “new direction” we’d all discussed. When it was decided not to go in that direction, that script was discarded and never produced. So apart from those rewrites I did on scripts that were produced, nothing I did made it to air and I asked to have my name not appear in the credits. Requesting that was the only way in which I pleased that line producer.

If this all seems a bit blurry to you, we’re on the same page because it’s blurry to me. I remember I enjoyed having a little office on the Paramount lot and I remember going to the lunch room and sharing a table a few times with McLean Stevenson, who was doing something there at the time. But I can’t recall anything I actually liked about my time on MacGyver other than the happy feeling when my agent told me he’d arranged my severance from the show. I’ve met many people who remember the program fondly and I wish I was one of them.