The A-Team premieres on NBC on January 23, 1983


The living rooms of America were lit that Sunday night, January 23, 1983, with the peculiar blue flicker of NBC, the network that had decided—perhaps in a fit of desperate programming bravado—to unleash something called The A-Team upon the populace. Outside, the wind was whipping cold across the heartland, the kind of January wind that makes you think of bankrupt farms and Reagan's morning-in-America smile, but inside, behind the picture windows of split-levels from Levittown to the San Fernando Valley, something louder, brasher, and more gloriously unapologetic was about to explode.

And then, WHAM!

Out of the cathode-ray tube bursts a cacophony of screeching tires, rattling machine guns, and the sheer, unadulterated manhood of a black-and-red GMC Vandura. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the birth of the A-Team.

Picture it: George Peppard, that silver-haired, cigar-chomping veteran of The Blue Max, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Banacek, stepping into the role of John "Hannibal" Smith, grinning like a man who has just spotted a beautiful woman and a chance to blow something up. He loves it when a plan comes together, he says, and you believe him ard delivers the line with the weary confidence of a man who has seen every plan in Hollywood go sideways and still come out smelling of expensive aftershave. 

Then there's the new kid on the block, Mr. T—Bosco Albert Baracus, B.A. to those who wish to keep their gold chains intact—towering, scowling, a walking slab of muscle and menace with enough jewelry to open a pawn shop in Watts. He pities the fool who crosses him, and on this night America was about to learn exactly what that pity looked like when delivered at 60 miles an hour in a GMC conversion van.

Dirk Benedict as Templeton "Faceman" Peck, the smooth-talking con artist with the feathered hair and the million-dollar smile, charming his way past guards, bartenders, and beautiful women alike. 

And Dwight Schultz as Captain H.M. "Howling Mad" Murdock, the chopper pilot who hears voices and talks to invisible friends, laughing like a man who has stared into the void and decided it needed a laugh track. 

Together they were four fugitives from a military court-martial, framed for a crime they didn't commit in the steaming jungles of Vietnam (or so the gravel-voiced announcer intoned at the top of every episode thereafter), now loose in the Los Angeles underground, soldiers of fortune who would help you—if you could find them, if no one else could help, and if the price was right.

The pilot, stretched out like a feature-length movie under the title "Mexican Slayride," dropped them into Baja California, where a plucky newspaper reporter named Amy Allen (Melinda Culea, all earnest eyes and big hair) had gotten herself kidnapped by a drug lord named Generalissimo something-or-other. The A-Team, fresh from busting out of a maximum-security stockade, flew down in a stolen plane piloted by the certifiably insane Murdock, scrounged weapons from junkyards and sympathetic villagers, welded machine guns to Jeeps, and turned a sleepy border town into a symphony of gunfire, explosions, and righteous mayhem. No blood, mind you—NBC wouldn't allow it—but plenty of jeeps flipping end over end, crates of ammunition detonating in slow motion, and bad guys flying through the air like stuntmen on trampolines. It was cartoon violence raised to the level of high art, or low art, depending on your seat in the culture wars.

At the same time, with creator Stephen J. Cannell at the typewriter, the dialogue was cracking and the gallows humor and bickering often laugh-out-loud funny. And while the critics missed it, the show occasionally reflected on the lingering trauma of Vietnam veterans. "Do you ever think about it?" Murdock asks Hannibal of their 'Nam experience in a later season episode. "I remember it," Hannibal replies firmly, "but I don't think about it," as the sound of whirling Huey blades swells in the background. That was saying a lot for an eight-o-clock action show in the 1980s, when PTSD had yet to enter the American vocabulary.

This was 1983, the year MTV was still young and Reaganomics was promising that if you just believed hard enough, the wealth would trickle down like champagne at Studio 54. But for the working stiffs in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt alike, the promise felt a little thin. Here came The A-Team, four outlaws who didn't wait for permission from Washington or Wall Street. They built gadgets out of scrap, punched first, asked questions later, and always won. They were anti-authority without being preachy, patriotic without being pious. They were the fantasy of every man who ever wanted to tell his boss to shove it, climb into a van, and drive off shooting.

By the time the credits rolled on that first pilot episode, the American living room had been colonized. The martial jazz of the A-Team theme song became the new national anthem of the playground. Cannell had done it again, only further solidifying his stature as the best in the business. And the Boy George Episode hadn't even aired yet!

It was loud. It was garish. It was wonderfully, perfectly absurd. On January 23, 1983, the A-Team didn't just premiere; they staged a tactical takeover of the American imagination. And pity the fool who tried to change the channel.

Location: Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA, USA

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