The show was created after John Rich, Henry Winkler, and Lee David Zlotoff teamed up, having each just come off other projects (Mr. Sunshine, Happy Days, and Remington Steele respectively), and sold the idea to Paramount before ABC picked it up.

Richard Dean Anderson was invited to audition after his appearance on The Love Boat; according to producer John Rich, every other actor 'hulked' their way through the audition, but Anderson brought a human touch that convinced the producers he could be a breakout star.

Jared Padalecki starred in an earlier, failed pilot attempt to reboot MacGyver before the eventual 2016 CBS reboot series was made.

The series filmed in Southern California for its first two seasons and its final season, but moved production to Vancouver for seasons three through six due to the threat of cancellation over high production costs, even though the show's setting remained Los Angeles throughout.

Richard Dean Anderson performed many of his own stunts, leading to a back injury and foot surgery; he reduced his stunt participation in later seasons because of these accumulating injuries.

Dana Elcar's character Pete Thornton was written to have glaucoma late in the show because Elcar himself was developing glaucoma in real life.

The term 'MacGyverism,' first uttered by a character in the season 2 episode 'Twice Stung,' inspired the verb 'to MacGyver,' which entered the Oxford Dictionaries website in 2015 meaning to improvise a repair using whatever items are at hand.

In the first episode of Stargate SG-1, Richard Dean Anderson's co-star Amanda Tapping ad-libbed a line about having to 'MacGyver' a device, prompting Anderson to flash a knowing smile on camera, a moment the producers loved (though the line was later cut from a 2009 re-release).

In a 2006 Super Bowl XL MasterCard commercial, Anderson reprised his MacGyver-style resourcefulness, escaping a deathtrap using items like a pine tree air freshener, a tube sock, and a turkey baster, though the character was never explicitly named.

In August 2007, a survey by the McCormick Tribune Foundation found Americans voted MacGyver their favorite fictional hero to have on hand in an emergency.