NBC’s Unbeatable 98-Episode Action Thriller Is Officially Free to Watch on Streaming

Television in the 1980s had a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. Cars could jump over just about anything, a good punch could solve most problems and, seemingly every small town in America was being terrorized by a biker gang. But even by those standards, The A-Team existed in a universe all its own.

The NBC series debuted in 1983 and quickly became one of the biggest shows on television, finishing its first season in the Nielsen top 10 and climbing even higher in its second. The premise was explained every week in one of the most memorable opening narrations in television history: Four Vietnam veterans, imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit, escaped and went underground, and now they survive as soldiers of fortune. “If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them,” the voice-over promised, “maybe you can hire the A-Team.”

More than 40 years later, you can find them pretty easily. The entire five-season run of The A-Team is currently streaming free on Tubi. Watching it these days makes something obvious that I didn’t fully appreciate when I watched the show as a kid: The A-Team was essentially a live-action cartoon.

That isn’t an insult. In fact, it’s probably the secret to why the show remains so beloved even today.

The A-Team had its own laws of physics

Every member of The A-Team was practically a cartoon character before anyone fired a gun.

There was George Peppard’s “Hannibal,” the cigar-chomping mastermind who loved disguises almost as much as he loved it when a plan came together. Dirk Benedict’s “Face” could charm or con seemingly anyone into giving the team whatever they needed. Dwight Schultz’s “Howling Mad” Murdock was supposedly insane, although Schultz was so good at playing him that Murdock frequently seemed to understand the absurdity around him better than anyone else.

Then there was Mr. T. “B.A.” Baracus was an enormous, mohawked mechanic covered in gold chains who could build or repair seemingly anything but was absolutely terrified of flying. Since Murdock happened to be the team’s pilot, this presented a recurring problem. The solution was rarely to convince B.A. to get on the plane. Instead, his friends would trick him, drug him or otherwise knock him unconscious.

The show’s most cartoonish quality, however, was its violence. The A-Team fired an astonishing number of bullets during its five seasons and seemed determined not to hit anyone with them. Cars were flipped over. Jeeps tumbled down hills. Helicopters crashed. Explosions!. And then, almost without fail, the camera would make sure we saw the bad guys crawling out of the wreckage, perhaps rubbing their heads but otherwise looking remarkably healthy.

The A-Team weren’t necessarily terrible shots. They were just operating under Wile E. Coyote rules.

All that ridiculousness had a lot of heart

NBC

Strip away the machine guns, explosions, and increasingly elaborate contraptions, however, and The A-Team was usually telling a remarkably simple story: Somebody needed help.

The team might technically have been mercenaries, but their clientele wasn’t exactly overflowing with people looking to hire a private army. In the first season alone, they rescued a young woman from a religious cult, helped a sheriff being terrorized by a motorcycle gang, came to the aid of a struggling farmer ,and defended Manhattan shopkeepers from a protection racket.

The details changed, but the morality almost always stayed the same. Somebody powerful was bullying somebody who couldn’t fight back, and the A-Team showed up to even the odds.

In that sense, Hannibal, Face, B.A., and Murdock were closer to superheroes than traditional action heroes. They had secret identities and a hidden headquarters of sorts, were pursued by authorities who misunderstood them, and traveled around helping strangers who had nowhere else to turn. The show even gave viewers instructions for summoning them every week.

Occasionally, the topics the show explored with all that silliness were surprisingly serious. Season 2’s “Labor Pains” finds the team helping migrant farmworkers being exploited by a wealthy landowner who won’t pay them fairly or allow them to leave. Hannibal encourages the workers to organize, Face helps conduct a union vote, and the A-Team protects them from hired thugs trying to break up the effort.

This is still The A-Team, though, so naturally the climactic battle involves a homemade cannon that fires cabbages. Only this series could tell a story about exploited farmworkers organizing a union and decide what the situation really needed was weaponized produce.

The formula was the point

The A-Team wasn’t interested in reinventing itself every week. Somebody needed help, Hannibal had a plan and, somewhere along the way, the team would inevitably turn a pile of scrap metal into something that looked capable of invading a small country.

That predictability was part of the appeal. For kids watching in the ’80s, The A-Team offered all the dangerous stuff from grown-up action movies — machine guns, mercenaries, car chases, and explosions — without many of the consequences. The bad guys lost, the little guy got some help, and four wanted fugitives in a black GMC van made sure everything turned out all right.

Ironically, the show ran into trouble when it tried to mess with that formula. After declining ratings, Season 5 gave The A-Team a fairly dramatic overhaul. The fugitives were finally captured, then began taking missions from mysterious government operative General Hunt Stockwell, played by Robert Vaughn. Suddenly, the guys who had spent years helping desperate people who managed to find them were essentially working for the government.

NBC/Everett Collection

The changes didn’t save the show, which ended after five seasons. And television was changing around it. By the second half of the decade, action shows like Miami Vice were making violence look slicker and more adult, while dramas such as L.A. Law were helping usher network television toward something a little more sophisticated than four guys building a tank in a barn.

There’s nothing sophisticated about The A-Team. That’s part of its charm. More than 40 years later, it remains a wonderfully preserved example of a particular kind of ’80s television: big characters, simple morality, ridiculous action, and just enough heart underneath all the explosions.

It wasn’t realistic. It barely seemed interested in reality. But as a live-action cartoon with a moral code and an apparently unlimited supply of exploding Jeeps, it was pretty hard not to love when a plan came together.