There's no greater sign of the creative bankruptcy in Hollywood these days than the fact that pretty much any old TV series, no matter how stale or silly, is ripe for a remake. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a TV series from my youth that hasn't been remade.
"Charlie's Angels," "S.W.A.T.," "Starsky & Hutch," "The Dukes of Hazzard," "The Brady Bunch," "Scooby Doo," "Bewitched," "Lost In Space" . . . the list goes on and on, and good luck finding one that wasn't a big steaming pile of bad. The only thing that's amazing is they have yet to tackle that "Moby Dick" of perpetual re-runs, "Gilligan's Island." Oh, wait: Warner Bros. has that in production. (And I'll give you even odds that Hugh Grant is cast as The Professor, 3:1 on Jay Baruchel as Gilligan, and 10:1 that it's going to suck Twizzlers.)
The warm glow of childhood comfort cathode rays fades quickly in the harsh light of adulthood, ¥1,800 tickets, and the inescapable feeling that vast effort and resources have been poured into aping something that just wasn't that great in the first place. Which brings us to "The A-Team." A staple of early-1980s TV, the show featured the likably flaky bouncer-turned-actor Mr. T, who with his mohawk, beyond-bling style, and penchant for calling everyone a "fool" or "sucka" was a memorably cartoonish character. The series' premise involved four special forces operatives who were accused of a crime they didn't commit in Vietnam and subsequently wound up working as mercenaries on the run from the law. It was basically "Mission: Impossible" for the Reagan era, with dumbed-down plots, ramped-up firepower and utterly gratuitous use of explosions, a TV cousin to the 'roid-rage action that Arnold Schwarznegger and Sylvester Stallone were championing on the big-screen.