TV Madness 2019: MacGyver, Blue Bloods square off in first round
TV Madness 2019 is officially upon us! March is one of our favorite times of the year for many reasons — spring is in the air, the days are getting longer, and the idea of a bracket is a part of our pop-culture lexicon. TV Madness is CarterMatt’s version of March Madness, where a number of fantastic shows from across the map face off against each other. There are seedings, head-to-head showdowns, and the performance of each show is based entirely on you, the reader.
Today marks the final day of the first round of TV Madness and here, we’ve got a showdown of two CBS Friday-night shows! Blue Bloods and MacGyver are used to performing in concert with one another. For the sake of today, though, they are rivals doing battle to make it to round 2. We like this showdown just because they’re both creatively strong shows. Yet, they each still have something more to prove within the larger context of this tournament.
If you’ve taken part in CarterMatt’s TV Madness before, you likely know how this works — we spotlight the two competitors and then, on the other side of it, give you a poll for you to commence your voting! The poll is located at the bottom of this article.
How voting works – Vote however often you would like! (Technical instructions for multiple voting can be found right above the poll.) We will keep this poll open until Monday, March 18 at 1:00 p.m. Pacific time. The winner of this battle will take on either Grey’s Anatomy or whoever manages to win the play-in round, which voting is still going on for as we speak. (Polling will conclude on that when we get around to 1:00 p.m. Pacific time.)
You can see the full bracket (including start dates for each individual round) in the graphic at the top of this article.
The competitors
MacGyver (#3 seed) – The modern-day version of the classic series has been a little bit of an under-the-radar warrior for the better part of the past couple of tournaments. It always tends to fare reasonably well, though it still needs to crack those later rounds. Could this be the time? It’s possible, especially since the affection that is out there towards this season only seems to grow with each passing season. What it offers to the TV landscape is a near-constant sense of excitement — it’s entertaining and at times funny, but there is also a sense of joyous discovery that comes from watching it. It really wants to make you learn more about science and innovation.
We know that for many MacGyver viewers out there, it would just be nice to get into new episodes of the show once more; after all, it has been on hiatus for a good while at the time of this writing.
Blue Bloods (#6 seed) – Meanwhile, what we have here is a show that’s really defied just about EVERY convention possible for network television. It has arguably the worst timeslot of the entire week in Friday nights at 10:00 p.m. Eastern. Yet, for whatever reason it dominates there, generating huge ratings and basically leaving the competition shuddering in fear. There aren’t any other networks who even bother putting a scripted show on the air in this timeslot anymore! Maybe they don’t want to compete against real-life competition, or maybe they don’t want to compete against Donnie Wahlberg, Tom Selleck, and the rest of the cast.
Blue Bloods is as steady as they come in terms of storytelling quality, but there is still something it has left to prove when it comes to TV Madness — despite it being a favorite on CarterMatt itself, it’s yet to advance far in the tournament.