Transcript #6: TV Guide Article from late 1986

Another piece towards the end of the show. Be warned; it's not very kind in tone. It comes from TV Guide and is dated November 29, 1986.

"Internal Scraps Abating: Kicked Around, THE A-TEAM Seeks Nielsen Revenge"
Desperate to boost low ratings, the show's unloading the full Hollywood arsenal: better stunts, hot plots, market studies, new heroes

by Rip Rense

It was hot and dry at the ranch, high in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu, CA., when they went out to shoot an episode of TAT. You know, the "new, improved" A-Team. The one bossed by the Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Anyway, it was hot and dry, all right--and weird. The spread reportedly was owned by a weapons dealer who commutes to work in a helicopter. It's ringed by those strange monolithic southern California rock formations that jut from the smooth, round hills like Mr. T's Mandinka haircut juts from his smooth, round head. Hereford cattle grazed, incogruously surrounded by llamas, ostriches, Arabian horses, Ankole Watusi cows and pink plaster flamningos.

DB was shooting a volleyball scene with several ladies in tiny bikinis. Robert Vaughn, fresh from his home in Connecticut, watched from a canvas chair while perusing the L.A. Times. GP sat in another chair, perusing one of the bikinis. DS was nowhere to be seen. Mr. T was much in evidence.

"You need me in this scene?" he erupted, commanding the attention of all but the flamingos. Not for 10 minutes, somebody told him. T was wearing a yellow robe that said "I Pity the Fool" on the back, zebra-striped sunglasses, his trademark array of gold chains, elastic bandages on his knees, and was chewing an unlit 8-inch cigar. (He has asthma.) Rings covered most of each finger.

"Well, that's good," T (as he is known) replied in a voice heard perhaps as far away as Miami, "because I got to go to my dressing room and" at this point he used a rather earthy expression signifying his need to visit a men's room.

Someone groaned. Many grimaced. Someone asked T if he had to announce everything he does. T responded that people didn't have to listen to everything he said, then revised his announcement to include more polite language.

Buzzards circled overhead (Miz' note: how appropriate!) as T spoke and the "new, improved" A-Team was filmed, but this needn't have been taken as a bad omen. Sure, the show slipped to No. 31 in the ratings last season, after almost single-handedly reviving NBC in 1983. But T, once on the edge of being fired, is happy (and regular, apparently) and past conflicts among cast members and producers seem to have been all set aside in favor of hard work.

The work is a full-blown effort to restore TAT to its former glory. All stops have been pulled out. No holds barred. Marketing studies. Audience polls. Thousands of dollars spent in research. Two new cast members, better stunts, a major plot twist, a new time slot (leading into MIAMI VICE on Fridays.) If it all pays off, TAT might indeed last long enough to fulfill all the suicide missions assigned by Gen. Hunt Stockwell (played by Vaughn), thus earning a full presidential pardon for a murder they never committed. If it doesn't, well, maybe Mr. T could land a spot on NEWHART.

"Hey!" thundered T. "Can't find no chair! They take your chair, you know you're through!"

Well, TAT nearly was through last year. As the show's executive producer and co-creator, SJC put it, "Obviously we were looking at our last season." It was the writing, said GP and DB, the plot repetition. Granted, said SJC, it was the writing--plus the fact that the show was up against ABC's WHO'S THE BOSS? and GROWING PAINS, (Miz' note: again, I repeat myself...who would prefer that drivel over TAT?) which clicked simultaneously. Indeed, the novelty of the first season (written by SJC and co-creator Frank Lupo) (Miz' note: the entire first season was NOT written just by those two!) gave way to caricature in the second and third, when SJC and Lupo's attentions were turned to other projects, like RIPTIDE and HARDCASTLE AND MCCORMICK. Many regular viewers began to tune out Hannibal and Co. How many corner groceries, after all, could these guys save? In the fourth season, Cannell and Lupo returned and wrote about half of the shows---but the damage, apparently, had been done.

And there were other, well-publicized problems. While filming last season's opening episode aboard a cruise ship, Mr. T, in the words of one source at the scene, became "a little screwy." It seems that the air conditioning was aggravating his asthma, passengers on the ship were aggravating him, and he was already aggravated over a personal family loss. He walked off the set (not on the water--he was actually flown), then telephoned SJC with a list of demands. SJC then, in his word, "fired" T, who in turn rescinded his demands and went back to the show. There were other, less spectacular incidents---all, SJC said, "stuff that was going on that needed to get cleaned out, and it did ."

"When we got ready for renewal this year," SJC said, "Brandon Tartikoff[ NBC's programming chief] sat down with us and said, 'Look, you guys, we can just mush this thing into the ground, or we can come up with some fresh ideas and see what we can do.' Frank and I were very receptive to that."

Cannell and Lupo also decided to conduct a marketing study to find out what people liked about the show, and what they didn't. A research organization was commissioned to carry out the work, which was done after Cannell and Lupo had tentatively decided on the new characters and format.

Ten cities across America were polled on important issues--by means of discussion groups carefully monitored by video, telephone surveys and questionnaires. People were asked such burning questions as: Would Hannibal do this? What would you think if B.A. tried that? (Miz' note: I wonder if one of these lovely committees was behind the decision to kick poor Murdock out of the VA?) and other hypothetical inquiries that toyed with the characters and plot structure of the show.

"I just wanted to get some kind of a fix," SJC explained, "on what was happening with the show via the audience."

The producers found that the changes they had in mind jibed well with audience preferences. Adding Vaughn as Stockwell and Eddie Velez as special effects expert Frankie "Dishpan" Santana made sense both before and after the research. So what good was it?

"In my opinion," SJC continued, "it isn't really anything more than an indicator, a tool, and if you overreact to it, you're bound to make a mistake."

SJC, this time around, was bound and determined not to make mistakes. One idea that did not make sense for the revised TAT was a female. "We gave them two shots," said SJC, referring to actresses Melinda Culea and Marla Heasley---who portrayed A-Teamettes during the show's first two seasons.

"It didn't seem to us that four guys who were Vietnam veterans with combat experience would be dragging around a woman reporter with 'em," SJC continued. "Neither case was the fault of the actress. We just weren't able to write the kinds of stories to accommodate a woman very well."

They were able to write stories to accommodate Vaughn, however--who finds himself in a role not unlike Leo G. Carroll's part on the old MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. series. Vaughn was only too happy to join the show, no matter what its future---but for, shall we say, less-than-artistic reasons.

"What makes anything compelling for me," he said flatly, "is how much money they pay me, and how many days per week I work. I live in Connecticut with my family. This was a job that allowed me to spend 80 percent of my time at home and 20 percent in Hollywood on the show. It's quite a pragmatic matter."

Besides, his young son is rather tickled that his old man can boss Mr. T around. But geez, General, wasn't there even a trace of artistic reward in this thing?

"Artistic rewards," he said soberly, "come about once a decade for most actors, and I've had one recently. I did a production of INHERIT THE WIND with E.G. Marshall on stage in New Jersey. I expect to get another one sometime in the next decade."

Indeed...

Mr. T reappeared. A lady, it seemed, had misplaced her ring. T looked menacing. His Mandinka was erect (Miz' note: that came out wrong!)

"I'm going to search every man, woman, dog, and Muppet until we find it!" he announced ever so gently, at about the decibel level of a leaf blower.

Then DB appeared, chomping a lengthy Punch cigar (he's converted GP and T to the things). An outspoken, high-profile fellow, DB sat down near one of the plaster flamingos. He squinted up into the big, nasty California sun, and puffed on the hot, burning tobacco. Yes, he's allowed. SJC is right. Marketing is a tool. Something on the order of a left-handed monkey wrench.

"The quality of this show was going into the toilet," he said. "I didn't need anybody to tell me that the show was going to have trouble in the ratings. But they paid a lot of money and hired a lot of research people. Don't you think that these people would be trying to make this show a success even if they didn't have some 'guru' research company?"

Them's fightin' words, Dirk.

"This is all marketing. If you want to pump up a show, then do what anybody in America does, which is exterior, superficial. The only thing anybody understands in America in terms of rejuvenation, whether it is in your personal life, your sex life, your career---anything---is to add on. On this show, we just add. More characters. It's like a football team saying, 'Well, we won't win any games with 11 people, so let's try 13!'"

GP, limping painfully around the set with a bone spur in his heel, put it in slightly more earthy terms.

"The audience studies that networks do are like trying to find out what sex is like by taking interviews...and never getting the message!"

"Most ofetn, if you ask an audience, 'Would you like to see a Western?' they'll say 'No.' Then a good Western comes along and they say, 'Oh, I didn't know you were going to do that."

DB said he and GP "screamed"--along with DS---for two years that the format was stagnating, but "we were told to do our jobs and shut up." He warned repeatedly that they'd saved one too many mom-and-pop service stations. Yet, even now, after the research studies, he says, things aren't really all that different.

"We still blow things up, we still never get shot," DB said. "We still always win. But this is the fourth week and it's all been very well written. Who knows? Maybe the audience will freak out. Maybe Eddie Velez will become the next Don Johnson, and there we go!"

Still, there was every appearance of peace that day at the ranch. DB, after all, was chuckling. GP winked. Mr. T found his chair, and the lady recovered her ring. The buzzards overhead were apparently only window-shopping. It did seem that, for the moment, cast and crew of this "new, improved" A-Team had pulled together to give this season their best, most professional shot. To give TAT a chance to rise to its greatest mission yet--truly a do-or-die, suicide special...to save itself.

Any predictions, gentlemen?

GP: "I'm not a prognosticator. One of the things that helped us gain an audience was that we were different; we were fresh. Now there will be more mystery, more suspense."

Tartikoff: "I feel pretty confident we'll have some impact on the ratings, because of the shows we're running against, WEBSTER and SCARECROW AND MRS. KING (Miz' note: oh, how the mighty are fallen!) We're not exactly going against shows that are going to explode into 40 shares."

SJC: "I'm not Muhammad Ali. I won't call a round when SCARECROW AND MRS. KING will fall."

DB: "Oh, I think it's the last season. You mean, as a betting person? Yeah, this is it."

Mr. T: Nothing. He had nothing to say. He was unavailable for any comments at all, and he did not offer a prediction. As he is wont to tell you, he's no fool.

Fini