Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

January is Cannell-ary. Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month is a Mike Post instrumental from a Stephen J. Cannell production. They’re my five favorite themes the producer of “Classical Gas” and “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” wrote or co-wrote for Cannell, and they’re being spotlighted in chronological order.

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire Mike Post and Pete Carpenter. The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Post and Carpenter’s extremely hummable main title theme from The A-Team.

My favorite Cannell show is The Rockford Files. (One of the many reasons why The Rockford Files is my favorite Cannell show is because it’s the most ACAB out of all of his shows.) The A-Team, the famously-contentious-behind-the-scenes action comedy that was a bigger hit in its first three seasons than The Rockford Files ever was, isn’t one of my favorite Cannell shows. (James Garner didn’t care for The A-Team and said to Los Angeles Times writer Bruce Newman in 1997 that “It looked slapped together. I hate to say it, but I thought they were making it for the money.”) But Mr. T is fun to watch—despite having one note to play, and it’s cranky with a chance of meathook punches—Dwight Schultz is even more fun to watch as zany pilot “Howling Mad” Murdock, and that theme is magnificent.

“We went and talked to Cannell [after reading the A-Team pilot script],” said Post about the theme he and Carpenter composed for The A-Team to Television Academy Foundation interviewer Stephen J. Abramson in 2005. “I said, ‘Well, look, it’s gotta be military because [that’s where] these guys all met.’ And then the middle section’s gotta be ‘let’s rip off Cream.’ Let’s rip off ‘Sunshine of Your Life’ [sic] for the middle section because it’ll be like Vietnam.”

My favorite part of the A-Team main title theme isn’t that “Sunshine of Your Love” part. It’s the drum fill right when the “And Mr. T as B.A. Baracus” credit appears.

The A-Team was, like many other Cannell shows when they first aired, a show where I tuned in just to hear the theme and then bounced. When it was on Fox, 21 Jump Street was the only Cannell show where I stayed put after the opening credits.

I never watched The A-Team when it was on NBC, where it destroyed ABC’s waning duo of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley in the Tuesday night ratings race—partially thanks to NBC’s nonstop A-Team promos.

NBC’s barrage of A-Team promos during the show’s first season was parodied in a 1983 SNL sketch I first saw on Comedy Central in the early ’90s. In the sketch, Eddie Murphy does a really good impression of Mr. T, who interacted with Murphy a few months before in a 1982 Mister Robinson sketch I’m unable to track down on the internet. Mr. T’s latest promo for The A-Team (“Ya better watch it ’cause if ya don’t, I’ma come over to your house and make ya watch it live… with ya mama!”) is disrupted by Joe Piscopo as extremely bitchy—and, in 2005, extremely racist—film critic Rex Reed, a terrible fucking writer who has the cinematic knowledge of a three-year-old who does a number two in the pool and speaks of it like it’s number one in the Sight and Sound Top 100.

Piscopo’s version of the then-New York Post critic—he doesn’t have the real-life Reed’s Southern twang—implores NBC viewers to not watch The A-Team, which was frequently trashed by TV critics during its run, because “it was worse than doing hard labor on a chain gang. I’d rather get a lethal injection in Huntsville than have to watch that piece of plop again.”

I didn’t catch The A-Team in syndication either. In the mid-’00s, streaming services didn’t exist yet (Lilyhammer, the first Netflix original series, didn’t begin until 2012), so if I wanted to watch an episode of a show I couldn’t find anywhere, I either rented from Netflix the DVD that carried it or I bought the episode at the iTunes Store. When I noticed that The A-Team’s entire run was available at the iTunes Store, I bought at work a couple of first-season A-Team episodes, one of which was the Magnificent Seven-esque “Mexican Slayride,” the two-hour pilot.

In “Mexican Slayride,” which premiered right after NBC’s broadcast of Super Bowl XVII, Templeton “Faceman” Peck, the team’s scrounger, was played by Tim Dunigan, whom I best remember as Captain Power, before A-Team co-creators Cannell and Frank Lupo replaced him with the less physically intimidating Dirk Benedict because Dunigan towered over Mr. T and the rest of the cast and looked too young to be a Vietnam vet. It was a good recast because Dunigan wouldn’t have been convincing in the scene in “Bullets and Bikinis” where Faceman has to pretend he can’t swim to attract the attention of a female lifeguard who goes out with the episode’s villain. Benedict was also better than Dunigan at portraying both the debonair side of Faceman and his Angel Martin-like shiftiness.

I played the first-season episodes in my headphones while I was working—in the type of job I had, I was allowed to play podcasts or TV shows in my cans while I edited HTML code—and like I said, either Mr. T as B.A., the aviophobic mechanic and strongman who doesn’t have time for your jibber-jabber, or Schultz (now a RWNJ, unfortunately) stole the show. Those first-season episodes were alright, but I never went beyond “Pros and Cons,” a.k.a. the “I want traaaaash baaaags!” episode. When Narc director Joe Carnahan’s big-screen version of The A-Team came out in 2010, I didn’t feel like watching any episodes of the old show. (Carnahan’s movie was a poorly received flop that’s still disliked by most of the A-Team fanbase, but action movie nerds who are fond of the amusing hospital escape scene, the flying tank scene, and the banter between Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, and MMA fighter Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as, respectively, Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, Faceman, Murdock, and B.A. are much kinder to the movie nowadays.)

A few days ago, I found The A-Team’s entire run on Internet Archive—the show isn’t currently free on any streaming services—so I watched nine A-Team episodes for the first time over there. One of those episodes was 1985’s “Bounty,” a popular one among the A-Team fanbase because Murdock falls in love with a veterinarian who gives him shelter and is played by Wendy Fulton, Schultz’s real-life wife. I enjoyed “Bounty” because the race-against-time episode broke from the show’s formula: Instead of a situation where the team protects the client of the week from a gang of thugs and everything comes up roses for the team so that George Peppard’s Hannibal says, “I love it when a plan comes together,” the team has to rescue Murdock, who was kidnapped from the VA hospital where he lives but was able to escape his captors, and an unusually flustered Hannibal doesn’t have a plan for rescuing him. The plan doesn’t really come together until 32 minutes into “Bounty.”

Otherwise, I still consider The A-Team to be a middle-of-the-road entry from the Cannell factory. (It was the type of show where bullets never hit anybody—perhaps the most inane part of The A-Team—although “Black Day at Bad Rock” from the first season interestingly shows B.A. in pain from a gunshot wound while the rest of the team deals with both the military police and an evil biker gang. Because of The A-Team’s family-hour time slot, you couldn’t show people getting shot in the ass, but you could show the aftereffects of it.) I always preferred Leverage over The A-Team as a lighthearted show about a team of specialists who operate outside the law and help the downtrodden. Unlike Hannibal, Sophie Devereaux never donned yellowface and blackface.

However, Leverage never had a knockout main title theme like The A-Team’s.