Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 81

Reflections on the A-Team

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Typically, each episode opens with a victim of wrongdoing
contacting the A-Team via a family connection or the classified
section of a Los Angeles newspaper. Colonel Decker or one of the other
U.S. Army fuglemen is at the same time usually hot on the group's
trail and preparing to mount an assault on their px>sition. By the end
of each episode the A-Team has avenged the victim (and his or her
family and community) by blowing up lots of physical structures and
placing the bad guys in the hands of the local authorities. At the
same time, they have also managed to make the Army look foolish
by once again evading capture. In rare cases, the Team gets paid for
its effortS“ but their highly variable fee goes unmentioned and
unpaid so often that it is a miracle they can afford enough gas to
drive out of town.
Military, federal, and local authorities are so mercilessly and
routinely burlesqued that "question authority" could serve as the ATeam’s motto. In the grand tradition of populist comedy, judges are
unscrupulous, generals are autocrats, lawyers are mendacious, and
politicians are just plain contemptible. Only the "little people," who
presumably constitute the bulk of the viewing audience, emerge
unscathed as our heroes battle the forces of injustice. Hannibal's
other occupation as a matinee monster allows the show's writers to
mock the image factory as well—Hannibal calls Tarzan "a man in a
loin cloth and a forty dollar hair cut," and, in referring to the facial
expression of a conceited actor, says "that's not a smile, it's a bunch of
teeth." Compared at least to other '80s-in-form/'70s-in-content series
like "Knight Rider" (which aired in prime time from 1982-1987),
"The A-Team" is a veritable fountain of hilarity.
Comedy aside, a telling feature of '"The A-Team" is its
ultimately somber characterization of American society. While civil
and military authorities fiddle, ordinary conununities bum. The pool
of individuals who need the group's tactical and material support
seems almost inexhaustible: shopkeepers and hotel owners facing
mobsters, farm workers organizing unions, town dwellers fighting
chemical dumpers, workers trying to reclaim their employee
associations, stock car drivers finding their machinery sabotaged by
idle playboys, Mexicans sold into slavery by American venture
capitalists, Amish farmers attacked by outsiders, adolescents trying
to retain their families' farms, miners opposing South African moguls,
small businessmen plagued by industrial spies, peasants tortured by