Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver Boss Peter Lenkov Hopes Friday's Crossover Is the First of Many

Mac and Jack are getting a little taste of paradise on Friday's episode of MacGyver.

The guys are heading to Hawaii for a Hawaii Five-0crossover that finds them partnering with members of the Five-0 task force including Kono (Grace Park) and Chin (Daniel Dae Kim).

"I think they're a little skeptical at first with what MacGyver's doing and how he does it, because they've never seen anybody like this," Peter Lenkov, who is the executive producer and showrunner of both programs, tells TVGuide.com. "Jack obviously has a relationship and trusts MacGyver. I think [Kono and Chin] have got to learn to trust and believe in him. ... It's fun watching them react to what he's doing, and the unconventional way he does it."

Getting George Eads and Lucas Till to leave the Atlanta set of MacGyver to film an episode on location -- well, this particular location -- was about as hard as you'd imagine, according to Lenkov.

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"It was so hard getting them to say yes," he says, laughing. "I had them at 'Hawaii.' I didn't even have to tell them why they were doing it. We just said Hawaii and they were there."

But the actual logistics of filming the crossover were more challenging.

"Lucas and George only had a couple of days in Hawaii, so we had to sort of cheat Atlanta for Hawaii for a couple scenes," Lenkov says. "But, because of the last-minute nature of it, it was very tricky. ... We're talking Atlanta-Hawaii. It's a pretty hefty flight and distance. It's a six-hour time difference, also, in terms of coordination and all that. But we learned a lot, so hopefully the next one will be a lot smoother."

The next one, you say? That's right. Lenkov says that he hopes the crossover will be the first of many.

"When I was writing the pilot for MacGyver, I really was writing it tonally like it existed in the same world as Five-o. And I had planted a couple seeds in the pilot that I was hoping we would get to a place where we were lucky enough to be able to do a crossover. That was always the intention," Lenkov says. "Jack knows the Five-0 task force. He had a relationship with McGarrett back in the sandbox, when they were both in the military. ... Hopefully [this is] the launch of a story that we can continue telling with these two teams over the next few seasons."

Hawaii Five-0 airs Fridays at 9/8c on CBS; MacGyver airs Fridays at 10/9c on CBS. Friday's episode of Hawaii Five-0 will be a standalone episode; however, the following episode will be a continuation of the MacGyver crossover.

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