CBS Bringing Back 'MacGyver' with 'Furious 7' Director James Wan

The '80s are continuing to make a comeback on TV! CBS reportedly plans to bring back America's favorite DIY action hero in a new version of the series, MacGyver. The project will be lead by Furious 7 director James Wan and original show producer, Henry Winkler.

In the new storyline, written by R. Scott Gemmill, the plot will focus on Angus MacGyver's journey as a new recruit for a secret organization where he will be tasked with averting disasters, in ways that only MacGyver could.

A replacement for MacGyver lead actor Richard Dean Anderson has yet to be announced.

This will not be director James Wan's first connection to MacGyver. In 2002, he was tapped to work on the MacGyver movie that eventually never filmed. He is, however, excited about the direction of the series.

In an interview earlier this year, he stated:

"I never got into [the production] too much but 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? He's a really smart guy but he's so smart he could never feel like he fit into a construct, or into a world that is an establishment. So he's always a bit of an outsider. So he's very crafty, he's very smart, all kinds of science and mathematics and engineering. To cut a long story short, the idea here is I wanted to put my MacGyver story around something like a North by Northwest.

"[So] in the context of the story 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."

The original MacGyver series ran on ABC from 1985 – 1992.