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“The A-Team” was a top-ten Nielsen ratings show over its first three seasons. It was as popular as “Monday Night Football,” and owned the Tuesday night 8 p.m. slot. That was family hour on primetime television, which meant “The A-Team” had to essentially function as a live-action cartoon. Cannell and his writers could employ all the high-tech weaponry they wanted, and blow up all manner of vehicles, but they couldn’t kill anyone.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the series’ sudden ratings decline in 1985 (when it plummeted from sixth to 30th) came after the massive box office success of Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo: First Blood Part II.” That movie’s massive body count and wanton gore heightened America’s bloodlust. The gunplay wasn’t enough; they wanted to see the bad guys get shredded by Uzis and M60s.
Broadcast standards prohibited “The A-Team” from providing such vicious spectacle, so viewers abruptly checked out. When the series moved to Friday at 8 p.m. and nosedived to 61st in the Nielsen ratings, NBC quickly pulled the plug two episodes before it reached the magic 100 threshold (which guarantees syndication). As a result, the show vanished from popular culture, becoming a nostalgia item instead of an enduring TV classic.
Even if “The A-Team” had passed the 100-episode mark, it was too silly and dated to be a timelessly entertaining rerun machine like “The Rockford Files” or the original “Star Trek.” But it served its purpose, and remains a cherished Gen X relic to this day.
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