An industry plumb out of ideas

Just when you think that every crappy TV series in the past 40 years has been made into a movie, you get proven wrong. I’m referring to The A-Team, in which a guy who used to be my favorite actor, Liam Neeson, appears to be finally getting serious about the career suicide he began so many years ago in The Phantom Menace.

Remember The A-Team? The series? It was remarkably bad for a lot of reasons, but  mostly because every episode would feature at least a dozen explosions and a couple of fierce firefights with automatic weapons — and nobody ever got hurt. Even for a TV series, the writing was breathtakingly formulaic: Gangster victimizes pretty girl and elderly father; A-Team victimizes gangster. Mr. T would say “Pity the fool” four or five times, and that was it.

I don’t know what they’ll do with the movie, and I don’t want to know. All I’m thinking about now are which series that have yet to become movies. Hmmm. There’s Banacek, I guess. And Diff’rent Strokes. (“What you talkin’ ’bout?”) Not many others come to mind.