Every Friend Group Has A Boss, A Charmer, A Badass, And A Weirdo

The internet looks forever backward, like Lot’s wife, and that’s why I decided to write about a TV show I use to stare at about a team of friends who had adventures. There are nights I can’t tell the difference between my dreams and old Pizza Hut commercials.

But then I recently remembered something that happened. A real-life moment, flesh and blood, not scenes performed on glowing screens.

It’s a memory that tumbles like wet socks going round and round in the coin-operated clothes dryer of my skull. It’s a happy memory starring three old friends who I miss, two of them now dead. This isn’t a drinking story, although we all use to do quite a bit of that long ago. No. This memory is about a time I felt like I belonged to a gang that had my back, a team. I’ve been feeling pretty lonely recently, and I remember, once, walking into a party flanked by three women, a flamethrower redhead, a slender punk tattooed head to toe, and my girlfriend, her face full of piercings and camouflage pants pockets full of weed. And me.

We had not been invited to the party. It was in a warehouse near the river full of cool kids: the beautiful ones and those with wealthy fathers. There was a big with a shaved head who acted like security, I don’t even know if anyone asked him to stand at the door and glower.

He kept the narcs out, the frat boys, and the skinheads. The uninvited would see him and then turn around, but she started rolling a joint in line, and he waved us in, or rather, he let them stumble in, and they dragged me along.

This was the 90s, an era known for parties in warehouses by the river. It wasn’t that hard to find a crowd of young people doing drugs. But I never felt cool enough to just… walk in somewhere uninvited and then act like we were the ones who invited everyone. The redhead turned heads. The punk was our muscle. My girlfriend made friends. It’s a good memory. If it were a scene in a movie, the four of us would be strolling in slow-motion as techno beats punched the air. This was a few years before the new century, which isn’t so new anymore. Before the towers burned and the wars and floods and plagues. The last few months have been especially hard for me, for everyone, I suspect, but I’ve been feeling older and distant from others.

I’m starting to become sentimental in my dotage. Ah, the good ol’ days. The good ol’ days are a honey-dipped lie, of course. Things have been falling apart since the beginning of it all. I try not to dwell on the past. But this is a happy memory. The party was probably just an hour or so, maybe less—we danced, sweated, shouted over deafening music, all four of us. A party within a party.

The rest of the evening fades; I got drunk and high and fucked-up and probably woke up the next morning in my clothes, laying in her bed, our unhappy relationship straight and sober.

Every friend group has a boss, a charmer, a badass, and a weirdo.

An example: the beloved sitcom The Golden Girls, which ran on NBC from 1985 until 1992, was about a friend group of sassy senior citizens including Bea Arthur’s Dorothy, the boss, charmer Blanche played by saucy comedic actor Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty’s Sophia the badass, and, of course, Betty White as Rose, the weirdo. Here’s another: Paul was the boss, John the charmer, George a badass, and the weirdo was Ringo.

The hourlong weekly action-comedy The A-Team was about a friend group featuring these types. The show, which also ran on NBC, premiered in 1983 and had a modest five-season run.

I have been thinking about that show a lot.

It was a hit and, in retrospect, a fascinating cultural specimen: a lighthearted romp about a quartet of Vietnam vets accused of crimes they didn’t commit who spend their days on the run, helping out the helpless along the way. The show is both anti-authoritarian and pro-mayhem. The military is often the true bad guy, while the accused war criminals are the heroes.

The A-Team was at the cutting edge of pop culture when the nation was slowly renegotiating its feelings about the veterans of an unpopular war. In a few years, Hollywood would start producing more Vietnam movies, from hyperviolent revenge porn like Rambo: First Blood Part II to Oscar-winning dramas like Oliver Stone’s Platoon.

At its core, The A-Team was about wise-cracking patriots screwed over by the government waging a war against crooked fat cats, crime lords, and other baddies populating Ronald Reagan’s sunny America. It was a proto-libertarian vigilante fantasy, but none of that excited my impressionable baby brain.

I liked that these dudes were all besties.

The show itself was low-budget, with no more than two car crashes per episode, the first one happening halfway through before one of the many commercial breaks. The A-Team probably kept local helicopter rentals in business for the show’s run. That show loved two things: explosions and helicopters.

The interior scenes were shot on whatever sound stages were available that day and exteriors took advantage of Burbank’s finest vistas. You get the feeling they were in a rush to shoot as many episodes as they could in a day. The dialogue sounds like it was written on cocktail napkins at the bar across from the studio.

Big-screen silver fox George Peppard starred as Hannibal, the boss. Was he too old and paunchy to play a cigar-chomping mercenary leader? No. No, he was perfect. Old and paunchy, but perfect.

Dirk Benedict had starred in the cult sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica as swaggering spaceship pilot Starbuck and then loaned his minor star power to The A-Team as smooth-talking Faceman, the charmer. The character BA Baracus was played by a gruff former bouncer and wrestler, Mr. T, who had rocketed to stardom as Clubber Lang in Rocky III. And then there’s “Howling Mad” Murdock, the team pilot and resident lunatic. Actor Dwight Schultz makes Murdock a loveable, occasionally insufferable clown.

There was a 2010 Hollywood adaptation of The A-Team starring Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper as Hannibal and Faceman, but that’s a movie best forgotten. You can throw money at a story all you want, but money can’t buy four buddies cruising around the San Fernando Valley in a black GMC Vandura van with a red stripe looking to right wrongs in under 60 minutes.

It’s hard to believe, but a generation ago, there were only three networks, and they were colossally influential. That triumvirate shaped how millions of people thought about politics and culture and made billions of dollars doing it. And for the most part, the majority of their programming was primitive, dimwitted sitcoms and melodramas and shows about talking cars and trigger-happy cops. It’s not that the talent producing these shows weren’t professionals, it’s just that the executives in charge knew that the American public has simple tastes.

There are outliers, of course. But for every All In The Family or Columbo, there were endless hours of silly, crass, cynical TV shows produced and then forgotten about.

The A-Team was not a complicated offering. It was exactly what boys want, and it was a show for boys. From the moment I saw the show, I wanted to be part of a team, and I’d be happy with any position. For a brief moment, a decade or more later, I was part of a team. We had a mission. We accomplished that mission. I didn’t do much, I was just the weirdo.

I did what Hannibal told me, which she did while laughing because she was always laughing, even when she asked me years later if I’d cheated on her. Faceman was the fiery daughter of an old-fashioned Southern mama, born poor but fabulous, a sorceress in a muumuu who spoke fluent cat and never got lipstick on the butts of her cigarettes.

BA was an angry broomstick in a tank top. A warrior mongoose. She wore nerdy glasses and was constantly getting new ink, and was utterly fearless. They were my team for a few years. A couple of summers. They had my back, and I had theirs, to the best of my abilities. We grew apart, and maybe if we hadn’t, if we had held on to one another, the four of us would still be young and powerful, strutting around like we owned the place.

This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of John DeVore's work on Medium. And order his book, Theater Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway here.