The A-Team - Criticisms - Sexism

Sexism

During the show's tenure, the show was occasionally criticized for being sexist. These critiques were based on the notion that most female roles on the show were either a lead-in to the episode's plot, the recipient of Face's affections, or both. The only two regular female members of the cast, Melinda Culea (season 1 and the first half of season 2) and Marla Heasley (the latter half of season 2) did not have a very long tenure with the show. Both Culea and Heasley had been brought in by the network and producers to stem these critiques, hoping that a female character would properly balance the otherwise all-male cast. Culea was fired during the second season because of creative differences between her and the show's writers; she wanted more lines and more action scenes. Heasley was brought in to replace Culea as a similar assisting reporter character, but with a more fragile and seductive quality to her.

Ultimately, she was written out of the show at the start of the third season when the network determined that a female cast member was not necessary. While the character of Amy Allen suddenly disappeared between two episodes, Tawnia left the team on-screen, choosing to marry and move out of Los Angeles. The character of Amy Allen was only briefly referred to once in the episode "In Plain Sight," and a couple of times in "The Battle of Bel Air," the same episode that introduced Tawnia Baker, in which she was cited to have taken a correspondence job overseas (in Jakarta, Indonesia).