The A-Team: Season Two Review Score: 8/10 | Date Posted: April 13th 2005 In: DVD Reviews The A-Team: Season Two Review by Vince D’Amato Starring: George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Melinda Culea, Dwight Schultz, Mr. T. Directed by: Various. Released by: Universal. The Show: First of all, I’ll give a brief outline for The A-Team before getting into some of the more interesting points of this series - created and produced by Stephen J. Cannell, who had fantastic success in the 80’s and 90’s creating hour-long television series that centred around some very quirky characters. And obviously, the A-Team was no exception. The main premise is about four Vietnam vets – a special ops unit – who get convicted of a military crime that they were actually innocent of due to political pressure of some kind. Anyway, they escape before they can be dealt with and go underground in Los Angeles, where they work for hire as a specialized team helping out people who can’t be helped by the law or government for one reason or another. George Peppard played the commanding Colonel of the unit, always wearing a pair of black gloves and smoking cigars right in the middle of car chases/fist fights/gun fights/helicopter escapes – any kind of pressure situation, he lights up. Dirk Benedict plays a younger soldier, whose charm and good looks make it easy for him to basically scam his way through life – living in high-end LA apartments and hobnobbing with attractive socialites. Mr. T. plays the strong man of the group – he’s the toughest, but he can’t stand to fly, so the team has to knock him cold for their various world-hopping missions. Dwight Schultz plays Murdock, the only soldier from the outfit who was not charged with the military crime, probably due to his Section 8 release. The guy’s a nut. Finally, we have spunky female reporter Amy Allen (played by actress Melinda Culea) who’s a Los Angeles newspaper reporter, who joins the group to get the scoop, and to some degree, help them out on their missions. With the A-Team, producer Stephen J. Cannell created something that no one had seen before: A one-hour episodic that revolves completely around heavy action. Unlike other shows that were narrative-heavy and wrote in one or two very brief and specifically-coordinated action scenes, the A-Team took the reverse idea. The show’s high-concept action was always consistent, and the stories would serve to compliment the many action scenes, which would always include some extremely high-intensity stunts – and not just one, but several per episode. (And for some reason, most of the bigger stunts involved jeeps – I don’t know why, but maybe jeeps were just cheaper to trash). A lot of the A-Team was what you would see in the movie theatres (at the time), not on television, and people weren’t used to it. The show became a huge hit, but was also steeped in controversy. In 1984, TIME magazine put the A-Team on the front cover, declaring 53 acts of violence in the last episode! Parents groups were out to lynch the show – of course, what 8–12-year-old boy wasn’t watching the A-Team in the early eighties? And news programs were running stories on violence on television, and the A-Team made a perfect number-one case for it. Obviously, none of this controversy hurt the popularity of the show. And Season Two was not affected by the pressure to tome down the violence – so what you get in this Season Two box-set are episodes that fly fast and hard, throwing stories with the requisite four-to-six (or more sometimes) action sequences in each 47-minute slot. Also, there’s the famous montage that’s featured in every episode, where the A-Team has to build some sort of DIY assault vehicle or defence barricade, whatever that week’s episode required – and these sequences were always one of the more memorable quirks of the series. There’s a special 2-part episode on Disc 1 that is really non-stop action all the way through, and a lot of them follow this style as well. But for all this action, there is also the naturally comedy that comes with having such insane characters, and the dialog in the scripts are for the most part cleverly humorous. Watching The A-Team (again) is a ton of fun, in an exciting B-movie kind of way. If nothing else, it’s never boring. This was also actress Melinda Culea’s final season on the A-Team. I vaguely remember at the time that she had wanted to be paid as much as the male actors and they let her go instead… But I’ve since heard that it was the fight sequences she wanted to be more involved with. I have to admit, despite the usually sharp writing; Melinda’s character’s (reporter Amy Allen) involvement in a few of the episodes was no more than perfunctory. Sometimes she got more to do, like in the two-part show, but generally…. It was all about the boys. Rumour has it that star George Peppard felt this way from the get-go, and thought that Melinda’s character never should have been part of the show. Whether that had anything to do with Melinda leaving the show is speculation, but the producers ultimately agreed with this idea, and after brief token female replacement, the recurring female characters were dropped altogether. Getting back to the box set, the first episode – the Season Two opener – is actually the weakest one! Get past this one, and you’re in for a fun retro-ride down memory lane. The Extras: Nothing on this box set save for a bonus Knight Rider episode dropped in at the end of Disc 1, side 1. Obviously, this is just a teaser ad for Universal’s Knight Rider – Season Two box set that’s released simultaneously. Now, I have to question this – why distribution company Anchor Bay Entertainment, who have recently released another Stephen J. Cannel show (The Greatest American Hero) can pony up for almost 2 hours of extras on their DVD release, which includes new introductions and lengthy new interviews with creator Cannell himself as well as the entire cast of the show – and big-guy studio Universal gives us fans – nothing! I mean, seriously, it’s not like Mr. Cannell is not the extra-features-participation sort – he gave more new interviews for Anchor Bay’s Season 2 release of Greatest American Hero. So, what’s the deal? For a list price of sixty-five bucks for the box set, I’d expect a little more. Trivia: That catchy music was written by Mike Post, who has created some of the most memorable television show themes ever – including The Greatest American Hero, Quantum Leap and Law & Order.

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