The A-Team
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
Four wronged Green Berets, one van, and a rule that the good guys never land a punch that shows. The A-Team is eighties action television reduced to a formula so pure it became a language: Hannibal sketches the plan, Face cons the villain of the week, Murdock flies the impossible, B.A. Baracus cries about flying and rips a door off a hinge. The demolition is the point, and the show always knew it.
What lifts it above pure junk is commitment to the bit. Mr. T’s B.A. is a genuine creation, terrifying and terrified in the same shot. Dwight Schultz plays Murdock’s sincerity as a weapon. The Mike Post theme does half of every episode’s work, and NBC’s censors turning Hannibal’s cigar into a toothpick produced one of the great accidental props in television.
Watch the early two parters and the later episodes where the explosions outgrew the plots. A cartoon that used actors instead of the other way around.
Our score: 7.5/10.
