Monday, October 28, 2019

The A-Team Episode Plot Outline (or, how being a writer for The A-Team must have been one of the easiest jobs ever)

At lunch last week I got into a discussion about classic TV shows, and one show that ended up getting mentioned was that 80s guilty pleasure show The A-Team.  While talking about the show, I realized that at least half the episodes consisted of the following plot:
  • Somebody is bullying somebody else.
  • One of the victims goes looking for the A-Team to help them out and ends up getting contacted by Hannibal in disguise.
  • Hannibal (in disguise) goes to whoever is doing the bullying and asks them to stop; they refuse, he takes off the disguise, and tells them that now they're going to face the wrath of The A-Team.
  • The team builds something in preparation for the big confrontation, but we don't see exactly what they're building, just a series of closeup shots of welding and connecting things.
  • Murdock does something crazy (often annoying B.A. in the process).
  • B.A. does something awesome.
  • One of the group being victimized is an attractive woman that Face hooks up with.
  • There's a climactic battle in which whatever the A-Team built is revealed, and which often has lots of guns being fired but nobody actually getting killed or even hit.
  • The villain surrenders.
  • Conclusion.
Ideally, there should be a "hey, it's that guy!" moment with at least one of the guest actors; for me, peak it's-that-guy-ness was reached in the episode The Taxicab Wars, in which Michael Ironside played an evil taxi company owner, Brion James and Donald Gibb (Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds) played evil taxi drivers, Ernie Hudson played a good taxi driver, and one of the taxi passengers was played by the actress who played Jerry's mother in Seinfeld.

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