MOONLIGHTING (Picturemaker/ABC-Circle Productions, 1985-89) Lionsgate Entertainment

In 1985, series creator, Glenn Gordon Caron debuted a two-hour, made for television adventure/comedy/mystery movie of the week entitled, Moonlighting. Drawing on his admiration for the old Nick and Nora Charles, Thin Man film franchise made at MGM in the late thirties and early forties, Caron wrote of an inelegant détente between a sultry ex-model, Maddie Hayes, on the rocks after her investment broker and accountant abscond with her life savings, and, a raucous horn-dog of a gumshoe, who would rather ogle starlets poolside and limbo in the office than solve crimes; this unlikely pair of preening peacocks, unceremoniously thrust together by unusual circumstances, and, in a perilous race against time. Moonlighting ought never to have clicked, as it co-starred a virtual unknown Bruce Willis, deemed unworthy by ABC’s executive brain trust as ‘leading man’ material. Yet Moonlighting, despite rumors run rampant regarding a mutual animosity brewing between its costars, nevertheless managed almost immediately to spark an international craze for the weekly series that followed. In its first two years at least, Moonlighting broke new ground – and nearly the bank – as Caron insisted on a level of quality, then unheard of in television programming. Reviewing Moonlighting’s first season today, one is immediately struck, not only by its joyful sexual friction, sparking off Willis and his luscious co-star, Cybill Shepherd, but also by the inventive strain with which Caron evolves the franchise, introducing us to baffling, though mostly incidental crimes of a truly outrageous – though nevertheless, plausible nature, with hair-pin plot twists that make for an emphatically brilliant good time.

Moonlighting was the third project in a 3-picture deal brokered by Caron with ABC Television. While Caron’s previous two efforts were met with indifference and outright rejection, Moonlighting was decidedly different. Holding open auditions for the part of the gregarious P.I., David Addison, Caron easily found the embodiment of this character in then unemployed actor, Bruce Willis. Unfortunately, executives at ABC could not see the merit in Caron’s choice. Given Hollywood’s penchant for ‘pretty boys’ it is perhaps understandable. But what Willis lacked in conventional ‘good looks’ he easily made up in a sort of callous, yet ironically sexy/spirited charisma.  After shooting a screen test with Willis and costar, Cybill Shepherd, ABC reluctantly agreed to green light the pilot, hoping that if their movie of the week caught on with the public, they could easily recast the part when Moonlighting became a series. What ABC still failed to grasp was that Moonlighting without Willis was like Lunt minus Fontanne. The chemistry between Willis and Shepherd immediately clicked with audiences, and, could not be discounted. In fact, it produced palpable sparks of risqué sexual frustration that the prevailing censors cautioned Caron against taking too far. Nevertheless, the urge to have David eventually bed Maddie became not only the backbone of the series, but its lamentable undoing. So instantly popular was Moonlighting’s pilot that ABC immediately informed Caron he would be making a TV series.

Caron, who openly admitted he never had any such aspirations, now found himself at ABC's mercy to produce weekly episodes living up to the same high artistic standards as his original dream project. That Caron refused to sacrifice quality for the sake of keeping up the pace gradually began to wear his creative talents down. In the 5 years that Moonlighting was a main staple on television it never remotely approached its quota of 32 episodes per annum and, in fact, totaled a scant 76 in total, just prior to its cancellation. Season One and Two of Moonlighting easily represents one of the most outstanding – if quirky – romantic comedies ever produced for the small screen. Like most of the series one-hour mysteries, the two-hour pilot’s narrative is sincerely flawed. It begins when former top model, Maddie Hayes (Shepherd) discovers her accountant has made off with her entire life savings, leaving her virtually penniless. Determined to liquidate her tangible assets for some quick cash, Maddie arrives at the Blue Moon Detective Agency, overseen by the extroverted David Addison (Willis). Saying all the wrong things – but endearingly so - David manages to incur Maddie’s wrath repeatedly until the two become embroiled in a crime so crazy, it defies logic with only one clue to go on: a stolen/broken watch.

From this inauspicious launch, the screenplay drifts. We meet the baddies whose purpose is thinly veiled – they want the watch back. But then, bodies start to pile up and Maddie, possessing a very low threshold for cadaver gray, spends a good deal of her time screaming ‘bloody murder’ and repeatedly throwing herself at David to shield her from certain death. As chivalry is not exactly David’s thing – he would much rather bag this broad and call it a day – David proves his worth to Maddie as a private investigator, thus saving his livelihood, only to be informed by Maddie that she intends to become his full partner at the agency from now on. Moonlighting’s pilot is briskly directed by Caron to involve us in David and Maddie’s burgeoning relationship, fraught with misrepresentations of each other’s motives for coming together. David sincerely believes he is wearing down Maddie’s defenses. But she is only interested in the case, and reestablishing herself in a new career that will hopefully pull her out of debt as time - and this franchise – wears on.  In retrospect, Moonlighting is very much a case of style trumping substance. In truth, Caron and his team of writers always placed their emphasis more on the double entendre between Willis and Shepherd than on successfully resolving many of the whodunits that serve merely as a springboard to engage the two stars in what is essentially a ‘sex comedy’ with plenty of oomph!

For a while, this shifting focus, from sleuthing to seducing, sustained the series; particularly throughout Season One, Two and part of Season Three. Highlights from this first two years of Moonlighting included The Next Murder You Hear – an episode where Maddie becomes obsessed with the disembodied voice of a lonely hearts’ radio jockey after he is supposedly gunned down on air, and, The Lady in the Iron Mask; featuring a disfigured woman who hires the duo to find the man who threw acid in her face twenty years earlier. There is also the cornball, yet darkly perverse, The Bride of Tupperman; involving Maddie and David’s search for the ideal mate for a man who is plotting an insurance scheme by murdering the wife he has yet to wed. Guest stars featured in Season One and Two included Tim Robbins, as a career killer in Gunfight at the So-So Corral and Dana Delaney, cast as David’s conniving old flame, out to set him up for murder in My Fair David. One of the most unusual episodes from Season Two is The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice: a homage to forties’ film noir, shot almost entirely in B&W, with David and Maddie separately contemplating how an unsolved crime at an upscale nightclub went down some fifty years before. As a big band chanteuse, Cybill Shepherd acquits herself nicely of the standards ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘Told You I Loved You, Now Get Out’.

To some extent, Moonlighting crested after the end of Season Two, with both Willis and Shepherd, curiously enough, looking considerably older at the start of Season Three. If, in its third year, Moonlighting never quite recaptured its former glory, Caron and company nevertheless provided some groundbreaking television programming besides, including the most farcical episode of the lot, Atomic Shakespeare – a lavishly appointed and upbeat take on The Taming of the Shrew – and Big Man on Mulberry Street, in which David and Maddie do a big scale musical production number/dream sequence, reminiscent of the great MGM musicals from the 1950’s. Near the end of Season Three, Moonlighting began to show signs it was losing its steam. Guest star, Mark Harmon made his debut as Maddie’s old flame, Sam, forcing David to grapple with his true feelings for his boss too little too late. While David went off to drown his sorrows, impacting his ability to partake in their latest crime-solving ventures, the void was superficially shored up by secondary participants, Agnes DiPesto (Allyce Beasley) and Herbert Viola (Curtis Armstrong). While Beasley had been a second-tier main staple of the original cast as the irrepressibly dim-witted Blue Moon Detective Agency secretary, whose rhyming couplets were hilarious, the debut of Armstrong as David’s navel-gazing protegee left something to be desired; more so after Herbert and Agnes began dating and their ‘dead end’ romantic overtures took precedence, merely to fill dead air and run time.

In the interim, Caron reasoned the audience did not want Maddie Hayes to wind up with Harmon’s forthright man of convictions (after all, where is the fun in a nice guy with a brain?), the big build up to having David and Maddie fall into bed together could only be delayed for so long. Thus, at the end of Season Three their great seduction happened, only to suffer an even weaker expulsion in the inevitable ‘now what?’ aftermath to their big night. This proved a major let down for viewers. Unable to reconcile the biting repartee of the couple before they made it together with the softer/gentler afterglow afflicting each as a result of their consummated affair, Caron made another egregious blunder at the start of Season Four, separating the lovers for almost the entire season. David, sexually frustrated and jilted, was left to sleuth his way through a series of unprepossessing cases in Los Angeles while Maddie, wounded by his arrogance one too many times, fled back home to Chicago, to convalesce privately at her parent’s home, only to discover she is pregnant; quite possibly with either David or Sam’s baby. At the end of Season Four, Maddie returned to Blue Moon, very pregnant, but already married to Walter Bishop (David Dugan); a man she has met on the train back to L.A. – leaving David deflated and vengeful. In fact, Maddie married Walter in an otiose attempt to rid herself of her lingering passion for David. This ruse eventually imploded after David vindictively forced the couple to renew their vows before God and their friends inside a church.

Seemingly painted into a corner, Season Five opened with Maddie’s divorce from Walter and her miscarriage of what would later be revealed to have been David’s baby. However, instead of reconciliation between the two costars, the tragedy of losing a child reformed Maddie into a kinder/gentler woman; completely robbing the series of its electric banter. Maddie no longer wished to reform David. In fact, she no longer had feelings for him of any kind, referring to David almost exclusively as her colleague, even when her cousin, Annie (Virginia Madsen) arrived in town for a visit. So, Season Five marched on, inveigling Annie and David in a whirlwind romance. Alas, this too provided even more misdirection, short-lived as Annie’s husband, Mark intruded to reclaim his wife. Shortly thereafter, David resigned himself to losing Annie, pretending to have an affair with a co-worker so Annie could make ‘the right choice’ and return to her husband. Agnes and Herbert were wed and Maddie and David were informed by ABC that the network had decided to cancel their series.

All throughout Moonlighting, producer/director, Glenn Gordon Caron toyed with inserting ‘in jokes’ into the narrative; from having David periodically giving direct address to the viewing audience, to Maddie and David providing ongoing commentary and quips about ABC’s lack of imagination; also, the rigors of producing a television series. It was perhaps sour grapes for Caron that ABC eventually decided to pull the plug on his brain child. But while it lived, Caron had great fun poking fun at the fact Moonlighting never did fulfill its commitment to the network of 32 episodes per season, in the episode The Straight Poop, where real-life Hollywood gossip columnist, Rona Barrett made an appearance to confront a supposedly standoffish Maddie and David. Moonlighting ought to have had a better exit from prime time. Indeed, throughout its first two and a half seasons it was one of the wittiest, funniest and most adventuresome comedies ever to hit prime time. The kudos must be equally spread between Willis and Shepherd; a more perfect mating not seen anywhere in eighties programming.

Rumors regarding a feud between the costars was actually inflated in the tabloids. If anything, Willis and Shepherd had mutually banded together against the way their characters were being mistreated in the final seasons, railing against Caron and ABC than at one another over personal creative differences. Tragically, the last year and a half of Moonlighting unraveled into a hodge-podge; Caron, succumbing to creative burnout and falling back on the melodramatic and soapish to fill run time. This all but emasculated the trendsetting good fun that had trademarked the series for greatness during its early run. And Caron, who had never wanted to do a series, could nevertheless look back on Moonlighting – mostly – with a fond regard for having put his best foot forward on some of the cleverest writing yet experienced in a TV show. Time has moved on. Willis and Shepherd can no longer count themselves among the sexy cohorts in Hollywood’s ever-evolving cavalcade of fresh young finds. But the work they committed to on Moonlighting continues to hold up under our jaundice scrutiny. They continue to click as two halves of a smarty turned out sex farce, whose pairing has yet to be matched for pure sizzle and smarmy sex appeal.  

Lionsgate Home Entertainment has made Moonlighting’s five seasons independently available on DVD in four reissued box sets. Season’s One and Two come packaged together. For the most part, image quality is about what one might expect from a vintage television series shot on film stock, with a generally smooth image, exhibiting a dated palette of colors and bright contrast. Occasionally however, the image falters with bizarre shortcomings. Portions of Season Three's Atomic Shakespeare, for example, are riddled with heavy grain – as though shot on 16mm film stock blown up to 35mm, and, excessive age-related artifacts. Much of Season Five's A Womb with A View exhibits a curious haloing effect as though it were photographed in 3-strip Technicolor, severely misaligned. Moonlighting was shot on film for its duration, making it a prime candidate for a Blu-ray upgrade. Aside: I would sincerely champion this! The audio in all cases is mono but adequately represented. Extras on Season One and Two include three documentaries; Not Just A Day Job: The Story of Moonlighting; Inside the Blue Moon Detective Agency, and, The Moonlighting Phenomenon. Season Three also has a half-hour documentary that reunites Caron with Shepherd and Willis. For the rest, audio commentary tracks are scattered throughout each season, at times offering an insightful backdrop to a series that had no equals during its brief run as ‘must see’ trendsetting TV.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

Season 1&2 - 4

Season 3 – 3.5

Season 4 - 2

Season 5 – 2

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

3