Deadline reports that 20th Century Fox has plans to update the A-Team for the small screen. While half of the people reading this may wonder why the studio is adapting a modestly successful 2010 action film into a television series, the other half of you just blinked out into a fugue state, as the following preamble issues forth from the furthest recesses of your brain stem:
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.
Just as a previous generation of children agreed to household chores so they could stay up on Tuesday nights and watch elite commandos execute Hannibal’s plans, Fox is hoping that this same generation will teach their children to similarly tune in, and see the weekly adventures of a new lineup of wrongly-convicted commandos commit overly elaborate acts of mayhem.
As with all reboots, not everything can be the same. This revamped series promises to have at least one female member, and will likely do away with the gratuitous cigar smoking. Making at a least a passing attempt to honor the original spirit of the show, Fox is promising a “fun episodic mission-of-the-week show that mixes big action-adventure sequences with compelling characters, inventive cons and lots of humor.” Hopefully that’s code for “no gritty reboot,” and “awesome montages of booby-trap building, set to a bombastic score.”
Of course, The team will still be a rag-tag group of badass experts trying to prove their innocence, something that executive producer Chris Morgan learned about by working on the Fast and Furious franchise. Morgan will be joined by TV director Tawnia McKiernan, daughter of the original series creator Stephen J. Cannell.