If you're old enough to remember Singapore in the 1980s and have fond memories of eating kacang puteh in cinema circle seats, "pontenging" to "go Far East", getting beeped on your pager and trading friendship bracelets, Mediacorp's new comedy-drama Fine Tunewill make you smile.

The stroll down memory lane comes courtesy of the protagonist, Lisa, a 40something media company vice-president who is reminiscing her youth.

Played by deejay Vernetta Lopez, Lisa takes on a 22-year-old intern, Brando (last year's The 5 Search runner-up Shrey Bhargava), whose generation she struggles to understand.

Appalled at his preference for downloaded playlists over listening to the airwaves, she lectures him that "radio can change your life" and recounts how it helped her navigate young love.

This one is a remake of the iconic 1985 to 1992 action-adventure series starring Richard Dean Anderson as a secret agent who ingeniously improvised DIY solutions to save the day, often using nothing but his scientific know-how, problem-solving skills and a Swiss army knife.

In this version, he is played by a 20something, Lucas Till from the X-Men movies, in a clear bid for younger viewers.

I'm all for any show that makes science look cool, but the writers seem to have forgotten that it is 2016 and there are too many viewers now who have internalised decades of increasingly sophisticated crime procedurals and seen every trick in the book. And if they haven't, they can Google it on their phones to fact-check.

So a show needs to be on its toes if it is trying to dazzle an audience with its cleverness. Instead, the pilot episode - the only one provided for review - repeatedly dumbs things down or glosses over details in a way that reinforces the implausibility of the scenarios.

Are we really supposed to believe it's that easy to lift a perfect fingerprint off a glass and fool a fingerprint scanner using that and some soot and sticky tape, when we've seen much slicker, more convincing versions of the same thing on screen?

Or do we need text popping up to tell us the waiter's tray used to stop a bullet is made of 12-gauge steel, when we've seen trays used to stop bullets countless times? And surely there are far easier ways to set off a fire alarm than mixing tin foil and ammonia to create a smoke bomb?

In a nod to the original, MacGyver often explains what he is doing, either in voiceover or those around him. But this one has a tendency to over-explain - as if we don't know what, say, a phoenix represents.

And that's only the start of the show's problems.

There is also the cheesy, generic spy-movie music, which sounds like a pirated version of a Bond theme.

The dialogue is hackneyed, with MacGyver intoning lines such as "That dress may look dangerous but trust me, the woman inside is more dangerous", as he and his partner, played by CSI's George Eads, do a poor version of buddy-cop banter.

The plot - a foiled attempt to steal and sell a biological weapon - is a rehash of a dozen other spy thrillers.

The baddies are straight from central casting - a generic, scowling Chinese guy with "a documented hatred of all things Uncle Sam", and a British bad guy played by, who else, Vinnie Jones (Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, 1998), doing the same version of every character he has ever done.

The good guys aren't much better. MacGyver's best friend and roommate is an excessively jolly, wisecracking black dude and his sexy analyst girlfriend is similarly two-dimensional, the whole point of her existence being to damage our hero just enough to give him a little depth.

Finally, there is our millennial MacGyver himself. Till, with his boyband hair, blandly handsome features and air of unshakeable smugness, does not seem up to the task of helming a show that requires a hugely charismatic lead.

The series could, conceivably, turn things around in subsequent episodes, but it's going to take a lot more than a Swiss army knife and some sticky tape to fix this.