Plans for CBS reboot of the Richard Dean Anderson-led ’80s action series MacGyver are moving forward today as The Hollywood Reporter brings word that George Eads is the first name to join the cast of the pilot episode. The CSI star will play a character by the name of Lincoln who, according to the trade, is a conspiracy theorist who works for the government. Whether or not Lincoln’s character will be expanded past the pilot, however, remains to be seen.
Although he’s still aboard the series as an executive producer, James Wan is no longer planning on directing the pilot episode due to a scheduling conflict. Instead David Von Ancken will take the helm.
“My initial concept was I wanted to do a young college MacGyver who went to Boston, one of the great universities, who’s really brilliant, right?” said Wan previously. “He’s so smart he could never feel like he fit into a world that is an establishment. So he’s always a bit of an outsider. He’s very crafty, he’s very smart, all kinds of science and mathematics and engineering. I wanted to put my MacGyver story around something like a ‘North by Northwest’: He gets blamed for something that he had designed, something really big that’s something everyone wanted, and now someone has weaponized it and everyone’s coming after him. He’s running for his life and he’s trying to clear his name, not quite unlike the structure of ‘Enemy of the State.’ So imagine ‘Enemy of the State’ if Will Smith had the brains of MacGyver.”
Playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo has penned the script for the CBS MacGyver reboot pilot, which sees the show’s original executive producer Henry Winkler set to return as EP with Michael Clear.
