About this blog

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire ... The A-Team.

This was the introduction to one of the great TV series of the eighties. The purpose of this blog is to build up the definitive episode guide to the show across its five seasons which ran from 1983 to 1987. So this isn't too much of a burden, I'm intending to watch a couple of episodes a week and given that there were around 100 episodes made during its run, this will turn into a year-long project!


Friday 4 March 2011

There Goes the Neighbourhood s4ep10



Co-starring: Walter Olkewicz as Joe Skrylow, John Aprea as Woody Stone, Valerie Stevenson as Stevi Faith, Victor Campos as Juarez, Julius Carry III as Sergeant Moore, Robert Pastorelli as disgruntled neighbour
Written by Bill Nuss
Directed by Dennis Donnelly

The team is hired to protect a pop star who has been targeted after announcing a charity gig for a country at war with its neighbour.

Although you may fear the worst when this episode opens with a pop music number, this is thankfully not as weak as the other music-related episodes this season. The intention here was just to deliver a light, entertaining story and to at least some degree it does succeed.

Writer Nuss wasn’t exactly one of the show’s best writers but he does ok with his script for this one. It is, in all honesty, a one-joke episode but at least it’s a funny joke. In order to protect singer Stevi Faith, the team have to rent a house and hide out in a suburban neighbourhood. So, most of the humour comes from the team trying to adjust to normal life. They all wear dressing gowns, BA smashes his alarm clock and Murdock cooks pancakes for breakfast.

Given the show’s tendency to cast pop stars this season, it seems odd that a real-life pop star wasn’t cast as the singer the team are asked to protect. Apart from the early stages, the main plot of the threat against her actually only becomes the focus of the episode in the last fifteen minutes.

The rest of the time is spent with the team dealing with a group of bikers who have moved into the house down the road. There are some good moments here, such as Murdock shouting “everybody back!” as BA prepares to face off against the gang. Otherwise, it all looks a little like filler, as if Nuss wasn’t able to develop his main story, so threw in a separate biker/drugs subplot.

One of the team’s new neighbours just happens to own a non-operational tank, so you just know we’re heading for a repair montage followed by an explosive battle. And so it transpires, delivering a reasonable conclusion to an episode that passes the time well but remains very mediocre all the same. 6/10

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