Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 78

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(Miller 1988:96)^ : and Robert J. Thompson suggests that the show can
be read as "the first step toward . . . telefascism" (Thompson, 1990:
114). Although one guidebook breaks with the consensus and rightly
terms the show "something different: a send-up of its own adventure
genre" (Castleman and Podrazik, 1989:10), the more "refined"
segment of the television audience almost certainly remembers it as
an emblem of the Reagan era, as an icon of militarism and a salute to
machismo.
In this context, the years that the show was aired on prime tim e1983 to 1987—are suggestive because they represent the acme of
Reaganism, falling as they do between the recession of the early
1980s and the Iran-Contra scandal. But if "The A-Team" was
broadcast during the height of the New Right counter-revolution, the
show's dialogue, plots, and characterizations did little to advance
the Thatcherite Weltanschauung of the counter-revolutionaries (See
Worcester, 1989). t^uite the contrary, in fact: viewed as a political
fable, the program lampooned military and state authority; mocked
the yuppie mentality; and preached a diffuse creed of civic
humanism, inter-racial solidarity, and male comradery. At the same
time that it promoted and reproduced stereotypical images of
sexuality and gender, the show placed women and African-Americans
in positions of authority and routinely deconstructed conventional
notions of masculinity. While hardly a vehicle for oppositional
px)litics, the aggressively gratuitous form of "The A-Team" naay have
blinded critics to its amusingly sly and p>arodic content.
It is this writer's contention that the negative critical consensus
surrounding "television's dopey 'A-Team'" (O'Connor, 1990:C14) is
badly in need of revision. Dismissed as a Rambo for the small screen,
the series may in fact represent an "Alias Smith and Jones"^ for the
decade of g re ^ : a satiric take on Reaganite themes informed by the
more or less "politically correct" but ultimately innocuous social
values of the corporate Hollywood establishment. Such a claim may
at first seem slightly outrageous, if not risible. As an undeniably
popular intervention in popular culture, however, the show deserves
a reasonably close and sympathetic reading before it is simply
jettisoned into the metaphorical gutter of television history.