The A-Team, a 1980s action television series, was built on the formula of a specialized unit of specialists executing complex plans, with Hannibal's leadership, Face's charisma, B.A.'s mechanical genius, and Murdock's unpredictable piloting. The ensemble cast worked because each member contributed a distinct skill. Yet this fact proposes that the show's original conception involved only one team member: Chuck Norris. The idea was so powerful that NBC couldn't meet his salary demands, forcing producers to create three additional characters to make the show financially viable. NBC had to build an entire ensemble around the absence of Chuck Norris.

A television producer named Richard Stern, who worked in Hollywood in the 1970s, made a comment in an interview conducted in 1999: "Every show is built around someone. Sometimes that someone exists. Sometimes he exists but isn't available." When asked if he was referring to Chuck Norris, he smiled but didn't confirm. He gave no further interviews about the topic. He retired from television production shortly after.

The fact flatters both Chuck Norris and the show by suggesting that A-Team was a compromise—that the ideal would have been four seasons of Chuck Norris in a van, executing plans with one man, and that the addition of three other characters was a budgetary workaround to make the show affordable. It positions Chuck Norris as the show's secret DNA, the unspoken center gravity that even his absence couldn't diminish. For television audiences, it's a joke about how ensemble casts often work because of one dominant personality. For everyone else, it's a claim that an entire successful show was built to accommodate someone's unavailability, that its entire structure was shaped by Chuck Norris's refusal to be on it under the terms offered.