As Moonlighting Arrives on Hulu, Here’s Why It Remains Such a Watchable Hot Mess

By Tara Bennett  |  October 10, 2023 | 1:31pm
Comedy Features Moonlighting
As Moonlighting Arrives on Hulu, Here’s Why It Remains Such a Watchable Hot Mess

“Some fly by night….”

If you were an 1980s kid who read their TV Guides cover-to-cover and got excited about ABC promo images for the next episode of Moonlighting, that opening phrase from Al Jarreau’s silky theme song for the ABC dramedy works like a time machine trigger for your brain. That sax line instantly takes me back to the heyday of the Blue Moon Detective Agency, where former model Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) and wisecracking David Addison (Bruce Willis) solved mysteries, sizzled with sexual tension, and invented meta TV before it got cool two decades later. 

Thirty-eight years after it debuted on March 3, 1985, Glenn Gordon Caron’s hit series Moonlighting finally makes its debut on streaming October 10 on Hulu. Having only produced 67 episodes over five production-plagued seasons, Moonlighting never got a “second life” in syndication and only had a limited DVD release in the mid 2000s, which means it’s been out of the modern zeitgeist, pretty much a blind spot show for millennials and Gen Z. 

One can already imagine the younger generation’s reception to some of the show’s very 1980s TV detective series banter, and particularly Addison’s relentlessly horny verbal pursuit of Maddie. But there’s also a lot to still appreciate about Moonlighting and how innovative—sometimes out of sheer necessity—the series was in destroying norms for traditional television rom-coms, reliable mysteries and dramas.

A Little History

Before Moonlighting, Caron played with the simmering mystery partner genre with the TV series Remington Steele. Stephanie Zimbalist was Laura Holt, a private eye who can’t get clients because she’s a woman. So, she invents a boss named Remington Steele, only to have a suave guy claiming to be that man (Pierce Brosnan) walk into her office and become her partner. 

Caron clearly honed his casting for chemistry and witty dialogue skills on Steele, which he then amped up by a million for Moonlighting. Wanting to do another romantic mystery series, Caron inadvertently created one in the heightening style of Howard Hawk’s His Girl Friday, with Maddie and Addison having very similar vibes to Cary Grant’s Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson. The pilot debuted as a TV movie that set up how Maddie’s life implosion leads to her Addison and establishes their prickly yet witty partnership as investigators in Los Angeles. 

Caron wrote Maddie with Shepherd in mind, as she too was a former model-turned-actress constantly being underestimated or pigeon-holed for her looks. However, David Addison was a different story, with 2,000 auditions dredging up a then-unknown Willis to the top of Caron’s list. ABC didn’t like him and didn’t buy their chemistry, so Caron had to fight to even get him a provisional pass to make the pilot. 

As the lore goes, Willis’ debut in Moonlighting earned one of those lighting-in-a-bottle audience reactions of: “Who is that?” Critics and viewers loved his smirk and lighting fast quips, plus his palpable chemistry with Shepherd’s very forthright and independent Maddie. Watching the series today, as much as Addison is guilty of firing out era-common, cringey casual misogyny, Maddie absolutely never lets him get away with it. She’s got plenty of fire in her belly despite her profession making her world-weary and is uninterested in suffering (especially) male fools. As such, she either calls Addison out immediately, or catalogs his sexism for a more pointed inventory of his failings which is remarkably contemporary. 

Ahead of Its Time

There are plenty of shows that get continually name-checked for having an inordinate impact on the TV medium, from Twin Peaks to Seinfeld to Lost. Not only did they redefine what could be done in their genres, they also had a huge influence on writers who watched them and then went on to make their own impactful TV shows. Moonlighting also belongs in that list of game changers because Caron and his writers embraced redefining what a drama with comedy (a dramedy) might do in terms of pushing rules and structure.

The pilot for Moonlighting was set up to be a TV movie, but it’s also all over the place in terms of presenting its premise and characters. Opening with the “case of the week,” it defies the structure of the weekly mystery procedural and all but ignores that case for a huge chunk of the episode in favor of introducing Maddie, her financial implosion, and then her meeting of Addison at the business he runs where she’s been a silent investor. The script only comes back to that case when all the business of establishing the show’s dual protagonists and their oil and water vibe is complete. Only then does it circle back to forcibly throwing that case literally at their feet once more. 

It set a precedent that the show wasn’t going to adhere to expectations for a procedural mystery, or a rom-com. Caron continued to push that with the introduction of Addison and then others breaking the fourth wall, talking into camera to make asides or meta quips. Moonlighting also embraced leaving the nuts and bolts of the mystery genre behind for concept episodes that came as early as Season 2. The first was the black and white noir musical episode, “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice.”  Both Maddie and Addison dream about an unsolved murder case from the 1940s and it plays out in their minds. Then, the show got more ambitious with Season 3’s “Big Man on Mulberry Street” which weaves Billy Joel’s song of the same name into the narrative. Right after, “Atomic Shakespeare” was a period piece, meta-telling of The Taming of the Shrew. By Season 4, there was an air of consistent experimentation born of the behind-the-scenes production chaos which led to the claymation episode, “Come Back Little Shiksa,” and the H.M.S Pinafore-inspired, “Cool Hand Dave (Part 2).” 

For ABC executives, the amount of Pepto being passed around had to have been epic. But for viewers, the show was like riding a tornado every week. What started with the maelstrom of Maddie and David’s dynamic, then morphed into the writers being given license to break all the rules of structure and form. Not all of it worked, and trying to write a TV show around two protagonists who are not present is a recipe for eventual disaster. But Moonlighting took that comet by the tail and rode it to cancellation like few shows have ever done before or since. 

Chaotic Chemistry

To say that audiences fell in love with David and Maddie was an understatement. Moonlighting and Cheers—which both aired in the late 1980s and were partially defined by their “will they/won’t they” character pairings—got a lot of primary press for their fiery, opposites attract couples of Sam (Ted Danson) and Diane (Shelley Long) and Maddie and Addison. With Moonlighting, Caron dangled the consummation carrot for two and a half seasons before he made a definitive call in the Season 3 episode, “I Am Curious… Maddie.” It drew a staggering audience of 60 million.

Some point to this moment as when the audience’s interest in the show began to wane, and in turn the series experienced a ratings slump. But that’s actually too simple for the hot mess Moonlighting was on multiple fronts. Pulling the horizontal mambo trigger certainly contributed, but there were also plenty of creative problems behind the scenes, mixed with life changes and creative exits, that were equally to blame. 

Yes, Willis and Shepherd’s acrimony was an actual thing, with Willis’ partying ways and Shepherd’s exacting standards causing a lot of tension, and eventual real feuds that impacted the making of the show. For three seasons, it productively fueled the chemistry between their characters. It also inspired Caron and gave his writers license to address the press and rumors about the show, using its fourth wall-breaking comedic moments to comment on the outside noise about Moonlighting. Addison and Maddie often alluded to bigger picture issues on their comedic cold opens that felt like live-action Looney Tunes-style commentaries to the audience. Their fury also inspired some classic episodes, like the very on-the-nose comedic retelling of The Taming of the Shrew in “Atomic Shakespeare” and the meta gossip show episode, “The Straight Poop.”

And then the fighting started to actively impact the making of the show. Willis wanted to move on to movies and had a skiing accident that kept him off-camera, while Shepherd wanted to have a family and got pregnant with twins, so the fourth season had the writers scurrying to create episodes with one or the other absent from the story. Instead, they’d focus on supporting characters, including the romantic triangle of office employees Agnes DiPesto (Allyce Beasley), Herbert Viola (Curtis Armstrong), and MacGillicudy (Jack Blessing). Per Shepherd’s demand, Caron was fired at the start of Season 5, which resulted in the final 13 episodes of the whole series. 

It’s going to be interesting to see how audiences who have no frame of reference for Moonlighting will respond to the show. Some will likely check out quickly due to Addison’s aggressive flirting, and/or the common misogyny towards some women characters that was prevalent in so many scripts and movies of its time. But those who can catalog those flaws to the times in which it was made are going to be pleasantly surprised by the originality, creativity, and broad comedy of Moonlighting. The series remains a TV landmark for a reason, so it’s about time that audiences will finally get to discover, or revisit, how Moonlighting pioneered plenty of what we take for granted in television today.

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, Total Film, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and The Art of Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen

 
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