Even bringing Richard Dean Anderson (who's now more associated with his role in Stargate, anyway) back in the game would be unlikely to do the franchise any favors, especially as recent photos indicate that the man has become a card-carrying member of the prestigious Val Kilmer Blobfish Imitation Society, which would not do the active-to-a-fault character any favors.

TMZ
Yes, your childhood heroes age, and yes, it means so do you.

Why It Probably Will Anyway:

Because Hollywood is fucking desperate to cash in on a beloved character with a built-in fan base. They've already dusted Anderson off to do MacGyver-themed commercials a few times during the last few years. A big-budget MacGyver movie has been in talks for years now, with people like Furious Seven director James Wan in talks to helm to the franchise. Back in 2003, they even attempted to make a Young MacGyver series, but the post-millennium world was unimpressed at the idea of a show starring a snotty kid with Captain Planet hair, and it was never picked up.

Nikolay Titov/iStock/Getty Images
For whatever reason.

That being said, there is one pretty interesting potential way MacGyver could reenter our screens, after a fashion. A crowdsourced project called The Next MacGyver is aiming to create a new TV show starring female protagonists with MacGyver-like engineering skillsets. Now here's the thing: The show doesn't need to have to do anything with MacGyver at all -- they're just looking to capture the spirit of the original. The actual creator of the original MacGyver is even overseeing the competition to make sure this remains the case. So even though I'm arguing that the classic MacGyver character should stay buried, there's a chance we may one day see something similar enough to capture our imaginations, yet modern and different enough to stand out in its own right.

Or, you know, they'll just churn out some sad thing called Anna MacGyver: MacGyver's Daughter and hope that the pile of money this will make them is big enough to shield them from our rotten eggs and tomatoes.

Today, it's another story. No matter how iconic, a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am with a few cool features is unlikely to impress anyone in a world where robot drones chop off peoples' noses at TGI Fridays and Siri has completely destroyed our belief that a machine can ever truly understand speech. And since the human half of the KITT/Michael Knight duo has spent the last few decades running around in a red speedo, singing strange anthems for Germany, and wrecking his hamburger-eating credibility for life, it doesn't really matter how many nostalgia points we give Knight Rider -- the show's current Awesome Score dips well into negative figures.

Why It Probably Will Anyway:

Because they've tried and tried and tried and fucking tried to revive the franchise for years. There have been underwhelming TV films. There was the godawful 1997 Team Knight Rider, the Val-Kilmer-as-the-voice-of-the-car 2008 version, and even a loosely-connected 1986 spinoff of the original series called Code of Vengeance, in which a random hobo wandered the countryside and beat people up. None of these later incarnations survived beyond one season, partly because they were horrible but mostly because there was no way they could recapture the peculiar, cheesy chemistry between David Hasselhoff's 1980s Captain Kirk and the original KITT's Spock. Also, they all fucked up the theme song.

Have these failures caused the entertainment industry to learn their lesson? Shit, no. There is always at least one rumor about a new Knight Rider movie making rounds, and with the current success of the Fast franchise, it's probably just a matter of time before some blockbuster director or another is going to Transformers it up for all of us to cringe at. Here's a fairly recent rumor that Chris Pratt and Danny McBride have been offered the role of Michael Knight for the most recent version of Knight Rider: Let's Destroy Childhoods making the rounds. Since Pratt is rumored to be attached to every movie in production between today and 2050, you just know how that one's going to wind up.

Via Wikipedia
"Listen here, you beautiful bitch, I'm about to fuck you up with my talking Hyundai i40 Comfort Plus."

Before ER George Clooney'd our collective ass and Grey's Anatomy did whatever the hell it is a Grey's Anatomy does (Fuck-witted bondage?), there was St. Elsewhere. Although never as popular as its followers, it was arguably the hospital drama to end hospital dramas, with its seven seasons of ensemble-cast-driven havoc that regularly dipped deep into that darkest pool of black comedy that only the bravest and most deranged dare to drink from. Basically, it was a really fucking weird 1980s cross between House and Scrubs. Wait, doesn't that sound pretty awesome? Wouldn't it be great to get this thing back on, updated with modern production values?

No. No, it wouldn't.

Why It Must Never Return:

Because it would wreck the Tommy Westphall Universe.

St. Elsewhere famously ended with the reveal that its entire universe existed in the toy snow globe (and therefore imagination) of an autistic kid named Tommy Westphall. Given that the show had a shitload of crossovers with other series (which in turn had crossovers with even more series), this has created a popular paradox / fan theory: Pretty much every show you've ever heard of is interconnected -- and happens entirely in Tommy's head. We've already discussed this TV-spanning Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon that currently links a whopping 375 shows, ranging from Star Trek to Arrested Development. It's convoluted, insane, and also my favorite thing ever.

Too bad that unless they, I don't know, do some whacked-out "The hospital in Tommy's head"-style cartoon version, there is virtually no way to bring back the show that wouldn't end up destroying the snow globe ending. It's not like they'd be unaware of this rather well-known theory, and there's just one real way to address the issue: Either the character's globe would be removed completely, or the very first episode would see Westphall breaking his globe and the universe remaining intact nevertheless. Both would effectively shit all over the Tommy Westphall Universe.

NBC
Which would be a sizable dump indeed.

Look, there are precisely two fan-made pop culture conspiracy theories that I buy into, and fucking Skyfall already ruined the one about "James Bond" being just a code name MI6 passes from one sociopath to the next. I won't have this taken from me too, goddammit!

Why It Probably Will Anyway:

I'm not basing the return of St. Elsewhere on any specific rumor going around at the time of writing this, but rather on the circular and inevitable nature of television. Since House ended, there have been no demographic-bending straight-up superhits in the world of medical shows. Add this to the fact that our TV is progressively getting weirder and weirder. In a world where audiences are happily lapping up everything from President Keyzer Soze to medieval Barbies with attack dragons, it's pretty easy to see that the darkly comedic hospital drama stylings of St. Elsewhere would hit both of those sweet spots like a snow globe on the face of anyone who suggests its revival within my hearing distance.

Besides, the last time I did one of these articles, the most unlikely-to-return of those shows promptly announced its comeback just to spite me.