January 23, 2013
One of my favorite shows is Magnum P.I. I put it in the top tier of detective shows. There’s Columbo, Magnum, Kojak, then everyone else.
So I was watching it the other night and it occurred to me that, with only a slight twist to their backstory, the man characters of Magnum could easily have become The A-Team. They were in Viet Nam, they were a highly trained team. What if they were assigned to the classified job that fell to the A-Team? Magnum, Rick, and TC could be on the run.
This led me to thinking about what should have been a no-brainer: a Magnum P.I. and The A-Team crossover. It was amazingly obvious- the A-Team is spotted in Hawaii where they’ve taken a job and Thomas Magnum ends up working the same case. The army goes after the A-Team but mistakes Magnum and his crew for the criminals. Just look at the similarities. Think about it for just a second, it is screamingly obvious.
They could even have had Lance LeGault play a dual role.
While it seems so perfect in retrospect, it had nil chance of ever being made since they aired on different networks. (Magnum was CBS, A-Team was NBC.) Too bad, because it practically writes itself: Face pulling a scheme in the King Kamehameha Club, Magnum in the Aquamaniac suit, and I’d love to see Higgins tormented by Murdock. Just imagine them drugging BA to get him into the Island Hopper’s chopper. I am not much of a fan of fanfic so this is as far as I’ll go. I think this is one of the great unmade shows of television. Magnum crossed over with Simon and Simon (remember them?) and even with Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote. Neither of those crossovers screams “event.” I can only imagine how excited I would have been had this actually happened back around 1985.
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