Lessons from TV’s Masters of Improvisation

The ability to improvise and think quickly is a wondrous thing. It can help you out with so many situations, big or small.

To give you a few ideas on how you can improve the quality of your “life improvisations,” let’s take a look at some classic masters of improvisation from the fictional world of television…

(Note: I did not include anyone from “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” because that’s a real improv comedy show and this list is about fictional characters improvising on their shows. So get over it…)

Jack Bauer

24

Let’s get this out right up front: Jack Bauer is the most awesome character on any TV show ever. There are so many reasons to love Jack: he’s a total stud. He can die – yes, actually die – and come back to life in under an hour to continue fighting terrorists. He has the direct number of not one, but two presidents. He can get anyone to do anything simply by saying in a raspy voice, “there’s no time to explain.” And, he is a great improviser.

Oh sure, these days Jack’s improvs consist mostly of what household devices he can use to torture suspects. but back in the day, he was a quick thinking machine.

Just watch Season 1 where he has to break a guy out of jail. (warning: season 1 spoilers! But come on, that’s from 8 years ago…) First he pretends to assault the guy and choke him, but he is actually stuffing a piece of paper with a phone number in his mouth. Then he gets back in the room again assault the guy again, only this is a ruse to lift the key from one of the officers who breaks the fight up. Brilliant.

The first few seasons of 24 seemed to revolve around, “let’s put Jack in an impossible situation and see how he gets out.” He had to use all of his improv skills to do it.

He’s like the MacGyver of counter-terrorism

Fatal Flaw: He is a bit violent. And people around him have a tendency to get killed.

Lesson: Look to what’s immediately at hand. – When the unexpected happens, there’s no point whining about what you wish you had, or what “should” have happened. Take a cue from Jack: what’s done is done. What can you do right now with the resources you have available to you right now to get you what you want?

The Professor

Gilligan’s Island

If you think of improvising as “thinking quickly and immediately on your feet,” (a fair definition), then maybe the Professor doesn’t qualify. If, however, you think of improvising as, “making the most of what you have,” (also a fair definition) the Professor may be the gold standard.

Was there anything this man couldn’t make out of coconuts? I understand that the show was supposed to end with Professor crafting a Flux Capacitor out of coconuts, palm trees, and Ms. Howell’s jewelry that would take them all back in time before they got shipwrecked. But the show got canceled before they could do that. Oh well…

He’s like the MacGyver of coconuts.

Fatal Flaw: For some reason, he never even bothered to try to simply create a transmitter. Or a boat. Or patching to fix the old boat. Or a raft. Or a phone. Or anything that would have gotten them rescued.

Lesson: Remember the big picture – Improvising isn’t just about taking immediate action; it’s about taking the right immediate action. Before you start responding to a crisis, ask yourself, “is this the best way I can spend my time and energy to deal with this situation and get the result I want?”

i.e. Don’t get caught up making coconut explosive when you could build a boat.

Sydney Bristow

Alias

Jennifer Garner’s Sydney Bristow is the coolest TV spy ever. J.J. Abrams hit his stride with this show and established himself as an amazing action writer, director, and producer. So much so that when he did Mission Impossible: III he simply lifted huge segments of the Alias Pilot’s story and shots.

Sydney was an butt-kicking quick-thinking super spy. Pretty much every episode during the first two seasons involved Sydney going on a mission, having something go wrong, and then having her have to improvise her way out of it. Sometimes that took the form of simply beating people up. Sometimes she got a little (or a lot) more creative, like leaping off a fifth floor balcony into a swimming pool or communicating in Morse code via blinking. Such is the life of a super double agent.

She’s like the MacGyver of spies.

Fatal Flaw: Occasional Extremism Look, just because you come up with a brilliant creative solution to a pressing problem doesn’t mean you have to implement it. The season finale of season 2 ends with Sydney waking up after a fight in Hong Kong, which is not where the fight was – that was in L.A., so this is a bit of a development. Turns out, this is two years after the fight – she has no memory of the past two years!

Great cliffhanger, stupid resolution. We find out that Sydney wiped her own mind because she discovered some “secret” and was afraid of that knowledge getting out. So of course, the logical thing to do is to completely wipe her memory of the last two years Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight…

From an “in-story” stand-point, this was plain stupidity. Did she not stop to think that, “hey, if I wipe two years of memories, won’t I, super spy and all around inquisitive gal devote my life to figuring out what happened?” Well she should’ve, ’cause that’s what she did. Again, I say the lesson here is just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

Frankly, I think the writer’s introduced the memory loss angle with no idea of where they were going. When it started to go nowhere they introduced this stupid “I did it to myself” plot turn just to end it off. But I digress…

Lesson: Keep moving forward – What I loved about Alias was how things kept moving. As a character, Sydney was excellent at making progress, not just settling for activity. This is a lesson for us all – when Ding Happens it is imperative that we keep moving towards our goals, and not getting paralyzed and stuck in the mud.

Gregory House

House

An improvising doctor! House uses his considerable medical knowledge to test theories that normal medical conventions would never allow. Things like placing a metal scalpel on a kids stomach to find out where a magnet was (instead of cutting him open), lacing his hands with some chemical that turned a woman’s hands purple to prove she was poisoning her husband with gold, creatively lying (a lot) to get patients to tell the truth, doing tequila shots with a patient to remove a poison, etc…

Sure, House is a jerk and I am sure that the mysteries and solutions on the show are medically dubious at best. But for a fictional doctor, this guy is a master improviser. House could detect a rare cellular level disorder using nothing more than some duct tape and a pocket knife.

He’s like the MacGyver of doctors.

Fatal Flaw: He’s a jerk. And he’s always super confident, even when he’s wrong. If he was a real doc, he would most likely have been fired and jailed years ago for killing a patient due to a reckless procedure.

Lesson: Diagnostics can be creative too When we think about “using our creativity,” we usually try to think of creative things to do.

However, one of the best ways to use our creativity effectively is to use creative approaches to diagnose a problem. Don’t just ask the same questions over and over (especially if you are not getting any good answers). Mix it up, attack the problem from different angles, and throw out unique questions, even if they don’t seem to make sense. They will allow you to see and find solutions you never would have before.

Angus MacGyver

MacGyver

Was there any doubt? MacGyver’s entire TV show was based on putting him in situations where he would have to improvise. And improvise he did! Sealing chemical leaks, making bombs (lots and lots of bombs), creating a home made lie detector, rigging craps dice, making a magnifying glass out of water, fixing all sorts of machines with almost no tools or equipment, and many, many, more.

How many other TV shows turned their title and main character name into multiple spin off words:

• MacGyverism noun – Anything cool MacGyver made or did. By extension, anything cool you do or make out of nothing. ex: “I fixed my car with duct tape, chewing gum, and a box of Good ‘N Plenties. It’s like one big MacGyverism”
• MacGyver verb – To fix or create something out of completely unrelated parts. To make do without. ex: “We had no wine opener so I MacGyvered the bottle using a candle and chef’s knife.”

Sure, the effectiveness of his experiments was exaggerated, and the writers always left one key ingredient out of the explosives (in some cases, it seemed like the ingredient they left was, “an explosive”) so people didn’t run around at home blowing themselves up, but boy, there was some crazy creative stuff.

MacGyver made it cool to be nerdy (at least, that’s what I told myself back in the day). And he never used guns (except once, in the pilot) and wasn’t much of a fighter. He was truly a “brains over brawn” kind of guy, and TV’s first and best master of improv.

He’s like the MacGyver of MacGyvers.

Fatal Flaw: He ran out of ideas. Technically, I think the writers ran out of ideas. In later seasons he stopped making cool chemical and mechanical stuff and would just do things like, “knock out the bad guy by turning on the dry cleaning rack.” Still a thinking man’s operative, but not nearly as fun.

Lesson: Expertise matter when it comes to improvising. MacGyver was able to do so much cool stuff because he was brilliant. In order to know that chocolate bars can seal a chemical leak, you have to know the chemical make up of chocolate, the chemical make up of the leaking liquid, and how those two things would react when combined. Many of MacGyver’s MacGyverisms cam from a deep of understanding of chemistry or mechanics.

In the same way, the more knowledgeable and experienced you are in your field, the easier time you will have improvising and rolling with the unexpected.

Did I leave off of any other Masters of Improvisation from TV? If so, please share yours in the comments!