The A-Team’s real legacy is a machine that sold toys, not a show that told stories

“The A-Team” ran on NBC for five seasons, from January 23, 1983 to March 8, 1987. That is 94 episodes of a show built on a reliable engine: four former U.S. Army Special Forces commandos, wrongly convicted, break out of military prison and spend their years as soldiers of fortune, helping strangers while dodging the Army that branded them war criminals. Frank Lupo and Stephen J. Cannell created it. Universal Television and Cannell’s own shop produced it for NBC.

It is a formula. It was always a formula. The question a review has to answer is whether the formula still pays off, and the honest answer is that it pays off less than the theme song and the van suggest.

Hannibal Smith, Face, B.A. Baracus and Murdock

The core four are the reason anyone remembers this show. George Peppard plays Lieutenant Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, the leader whose plans are unorthodox but effective. Dirk Benedict is Lieutenant Templeton Peck, called Face or Faceman, a smooth-talking con man who is second-in-command and the man who appropriates vehicles and other useful items. Mr. T is Sergeant First Class Bosco “B.A.” Baracus, the strong man and mechanic. Dwight Schultz is Captain H. M. “Howling Mad” Murdock, the pilot, declared insane and living in a Veterans’ Affairs mental institution for the first four seasons.

That is a clean machine, and the casting is the show’s best decision. According to Mr. T, in the 2006 documentary “Bring Back… The A-Team,” the role of B.A. Baracus was written specifically for him. Cannell’s own account of the initial concept backs that up.

The show’s second-best decision was harder to reach. Face was written with Benedict in mind, but NBC insisted on another actor, so Tim Dunigan played Face in the pilot. Dunigan was replaced by Benedict, with the comment that he was “too tall and too young.” Dunigan’s own read: “I look even younger on camera than I am. So it was difficult to accept me as a veteran of the Vietnam War, which ended when I was a sophomore in high school.” He is right, and the swap fixed the show before it started.

The rotating reporter problem

Less fixed was everything around the edges.

Melinda Culea played reporter Amy Allen in the first season and the first half of the second. Marla Heasley replaced her as fellow reporter Tawnia Baker for the second half of season two. Tia Carrere was meant to join the principal cast in season five as Tia Fulbright, a Vietnam War orphan living in the United States, after appearing in the season four finale. Carrere was under contract to General Hospital, which kept her out, and the character was dropped abruptly. Eddie Velez came in instead as Frankie Santana, the team’s special effects expert, and was added to the opening credits after the second episode of season five.

That is a lot of churn for a show whose whole appeal is that nothing changes.

Why the ratings fell

The A-Team’s structure is independent episodes with few references to past events and few overarching stories beyond the team’s continuing motivation to clear their names. That means the show lives or dies on the individual hour, and the individual hours repeat.

Reviewer Gold Burt, explaining the ratings drop in the fourth season, complained that “the same basic plot had been used over and over again for the past four seasons with the same predictable outcome.” Adrian Lee, writing in the UK newspaper The Express in 2006, called the plots “stunningly simple,” pointing to recurring elements “as BA’s fear of flying, and outlandish finales when the team fashioned weapons from household items.”

Lee is describing the show accurately. He is also describing why it worked, once. The A-Team became emblematic of “fit-for-TV warfare”: ferocious combat with lethal weapons, participants never killed and rarely seriously injured, with the notable exception of General Fulbright. That is not a flaw in the execution. It is the execution.

The fifth-season reboot

The ratings fell dramatically during the fourth season, and the format changed for the final season in 1986–87 to try to bring viewers back. After years on the run, the team is finally apprehended by the military. General Hunt Stockwell, a mysterious CIA operative played by Robert Vaughn, offers them work. Complete several suicide missions and he will arrange their pardons.

Here is the running order of how the show’s pieces arrived and left:

My own ranking of the show’s assets, in order of how much they carry:

1. Mr. T as B.A. Baracus, the performance the show leans on hardest.
2. George Peppard as Hannibal, the plan and the cigar and the calm.
3. Dwight Schultz as Murdock, the one source of genuine unpredictability.
4. Dirk Benedict as Face, the con and the charm.
5. The van.

The Stockwell premise is the show’s most interesting swing and its most obvious admission. A team of fugitives who help people for free is a premise with a clock on it, and by season five the clock had run out. Giving them a handler and a pardon dangling at the end of a suicide mission is a different show wearing the same names. In my view it arrived too late to win back the viewers who had already left.

A feature film based on the series was released by 20th Century Fox in 2010, which tells you what the brand was worth long after the episodes stopped. James Coburn, who co-starred as Britt in The Magnificent Seven, was considered for Hannibal, and Peppard was the original consideration for the role of Vin in that film, which Steve McQueen played instead. That is a fun piece of trivia and it is not a defense of season four.

The A-Team earns its place in the memory of anyone who watched it after school. It does not earn much more. The action is bloodless by design, the plots are simple by design, and the show repeats itself until the repetition is the point. Five seasons and 94 episodes is a long time to run one idea, and the fourth-season ratings drop and the fifth-season reboot show what that repetition cost.

5.3 of 10.

1980s TV · Mr. T · NBC · retro television · The A-Team · TV reviews