The series features the adventures of Angus MacGyver, a quiet former secret agent whose main asset is his ever-inventive resourcefulness using an immense amount of scientific knowledge. This allows him to create an endless variety of unorthodox solutions, usually to escape/break into an establishment, such as juryrigged devices using the mundane items around him (with clear influence from The A-Team).
These inventions have come to be nicknamed MacGyverisms and even lead to the verb, 'to macgyver' - to jerry-rig a solution. (This word was used and possibly even coined in Richard Dean Anderson's current project, Stargate SG-1, in a postmodern moment early in the series when a character - not Anderson's - comments on the time and effort that had been required to macgyver a replacement for the Stargate's long-lost control system.)