Moonlighting (1985) – A Series Review

Damn was this show good when it was good.

Damn!

I only remembered a few episodes of “Moonlighting” as a kid, seemingly from its later years.  I recall thinking it was kind of interesting but not really my thing.  I mean, I was a kid!  This was an adult series.

In watching the show as an adult, I knew about the long drama of the production history while also being able to much more appreciate the adult-leaning themes in every episode.

The show really took chances but they paid off… at least during the first three seasons.  “Moonlighting” might have seemed like a conventional private investigation show but it quickly enough was doing unusual third-wall-breaking moves and trying a lot of chancy things… like randomly dumping the viewers into a full-on Shakespeare comedy fantasy episode.

Along the way, there were major twists involving the characters that I had no idea were coming.  Take, for instance, an episode with the revelation (after a couple of seasons into the series!) that Bruce Willis’s David Addison had been married/divorced 9 years prior in a rather tragic situation.  His high school girlfriend got pregnant, they got married, the baby died, they later got divorced after she cheated on him with a supposed census worker but it was later revealed that the cheating was with a woman and not a dude.  Amid everything in that episode, there was an elaborate dance number dream sequence.  Seriously.

And that was just one one episode!  Then they did the Shakespeare fantasy  one the next week!

So it was not a surprise that “Moonlighting” fans typically only received about two-thirds of a season’s produced episodes over the 5 years of the series run.  The show had serious production schedule issues but letting that slide in this rare case was a smart move by ABC’s production unit.

At the center of the show were the leads – Bruce Willis just as he was breaking out as a major star of the era and Cybil Shepherd in her prime.  The result was a clever mix of Willis being a male pig type and Cybil (As actress/model turned down-on-her-luck private investigator Maddie Hayes) being an empowered feminist career woman in the 1980s.

It was easy to see from the first episode that the romantic chemistry was red hot.

And it is damn hot.  Did I mention that it is damn hot?  Add on top Allyce Beasley as the memorable receptionist Agnes DiPesto and the show barely needed the great Curtis Armstrong (who was Booger in “Revenge of the nerds” and also the 2nd banana sidekick in a bunch of movies like “Risky Business”) when he showed up as a regular starting in Season 3.

Armstrong later gave some great context to the behind-the-scenes sagas on the series when he was not afraid to dish in chapters of his biography that touched on the show.  When he was added to the cast, the show was already a crazy trainwreck behind the scenes, with Bruce/Cybil hating each other amid a rumor that they’d had a quick tryst early on in production that went sour.

I don’t think that either has ever confirmed that root cause rumor but it was well known they were very hostile off-camera much of the run, to one another.  Cybil also had issues with the producers/showrunners but it seems that in later life pretty much everyone had reconciled with one another.

Like I said, starting fairly early in the series, “Moonlighting” had viewers wondering what unusual thing might happen next.  Was it Orson Welles showing up in a special noir-themed black-and-white episode shortly before he died?  Or was it the habit of doing little fourth wall-breaking asides that sometimes worked and sometimes did not.  These unusual asides worked best in cute little winks.  The more grandiose hi-jinx were less successful, like ending the second season finale with an abrupt, explained story conclusion that had workers at the studio literally dismantling the show sets for the summer.

“Moonlighting” peaked at the end of a magnificent 5-episode serial run that featured guest-star Mark Harmon in a love triangle situation between David and Maddie.  If you wanted to sample a few early episodes and then jump to this run at the end of season three, you’d really get a greatest hits impression of the show.

From there on out though, the show went into a sort of decline as it sputtered to an end after two more seasons.

I had long assumed that the lead characters finally getting together was the main issue but when it all went down that ended up being the strongest episodes of the series.  So, I was struggling to see how that was the problem and it turns out it wasn’t the primary issue.

Rather, heading into seasons four and five, there was a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ laundry list of problems:  1) Cybil’s real-life pregnancy made it so her and Bruce (who did “Die Hard” during her hiatus) weren’t in the same scenes (outside of some telephone bits) for 9 episodes 2) A writer’s strike  3) The ongoing hostility off-camera between Cybil, who was settling into both motherhood and a newish marriage and Bruce ascending into movie super-stardom  4) The ambitious scope of every episode causing constant broadcast delays and making for impatient viewers.

All of those problems were bad enough but one can’t overlook some creative fumbles as well that left audiences frustrated.  In particular, there was an in-show pregnancy that came out of the late-season 3 events with a ‘Who is the daddy?’ question that was never resolved.  It was assumed to be Bruce’s child but his character never got the benefit of all the information that the audience received and the result was heartbreaking.

So between a poorly-received miscarriage storyline that left fans very upset and Willis wanting the heck out to go be a movie star, it was time for the series to just end.

Creator Glenn Gordon Caron largely blamed himself for the show’s issues.  That said, I saw a good point about how “Moonlighting” should have been cut some slack by ABC and put in an every-other-week schedule to account for the ambitious production plans.  I guess that this wouldn’t have been completely unprecedented but it obviously would have been unusual.  As it was, the episodes were just too difficult to crank out on a nearly weekly basis and the pressure on everyone to still sort of make that schedule didn’t help.

What we’re left with was still a very special series, at least for three seasons.  Fans have since then even edited together a well-received ‘alternate’ finale episode that gave the season three aftermath a happy ending.  I found myself liking their version the best – the characters and fans deserved a happier ending than they were ultimately given.

I wish that I could say that this landmark series was easily available for modern viewers to find but the extensive period music used in the show seems to be among the reasons it never (yet) got a blu-ray or streaming release.  DVDs came out with extensive extras – including a shocking number of full episode commentaries by key contributors – in the 2000s but those are out of print and expensive.

ABC/Disney directly own the show rights, so hopefully it gets an eventual push into the modern era.

P.S.  As I mentioned, some fans of the show (circa 2019) made an edit of an ‘alternate’ series finale that picked up from the season 3 finale high point.  It re-worked some key elements of the 4th and 5th seasons in such a way as to give the show a fan-friendly conclusion to the main characters’ stories.  Entitled “Boink to the Future,” this fan edit contained a literal “Back to the Future” reference that kept in line with the show’s nature more than it had any right to…

http://moonlightingbttf.com/