Moonlighting is an American television series that first aired on ABC from March 3, 1985 to May 14, 1989 with a total of 66 episodes (67 in syndication as the pilot is split into two episodes). The show starred Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd as private detectives and was a mixture of drama, comedy and romance that is considered a classic spoof of television detective shows.
The show's theme song was performed by popular jazz singer Al Jarreau and became a hit. The show is also credited with making Willis a major star while providing Shepherd with a critical success after a string of lackluster projects. In 2007 it was listed as one of Time magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All- TIME ."
Introduction
The series revolved around cases investigated by Blue Moon Detective Agency and its two partners, Madeline "Maddie" Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) and David Addison (Bruce Willis). The show, with a mix of mystery, sharp dialogue and sexual tension between its two leads, introduced Bruce Willis to the world and brought Cybill Shepherd back into the spotlight after nearly a decade-long absence. The characters were first introduced in a two-hour TV movie which preceded the show.
The show's storyline begins with the reversal of fortune of Maddie Hayes, a former model who finds herself bankrupt after her accountant embezzles all of her liquid assets. She is left saddled with several failing businesses formerly maintained as tax write-offs, one of which is the City of Angels Detective Agency, helmed by the carefree David Addison. Between the pilot episode and first episode, Addison persuades Hayes to keep the business and run it in partnership. The detective agency is renamed "Blue Moon Investigations" because Hayes was most famous as the spokesmodel for the (fictitious) Blue Moon Shampoo company. In many episodes, she was recognized as "The Blue Moon Shampoo Girl," if not by name.
The show also starred Allyce Beasley as Agnes DiPesto, the firm's quirky receptionist who regularly answered the phone in rhyming couplets, a la Dr. Seuss. In later seasons, Curtis Armstrong — familiar as the character Booger from the Revenge of the Nerds films — joined the cast as Herbert Viola, a temporary employee turned Blue Moon investigator and love interest for Agnes.
Format innovations
The series was created by one of the producers of the similar Remington Steele with the network explicitly wanting a "boy/girl detective show" à la Remington Steele . The tone of the series was left up to the production staff, resulting in Moonlighting becoming one of the first successful TV "dramedies"— dramatic-comedy, a style of television and movies in which there is an equal, or nearly equal balance of humor and serious content. The show made use of fast-paced, overlapping dialogue between the two leads, harkening back to classic screwball comedy films such as those of director Howard Hawks, but which also led to chronic script delays during production in the series' five-year, off-and-on run.
Breaking the fourth wall
Moonlighting frequently broke the fourth wall, with many episodes including dialogue which made direct references to the scriptwriters, the audience, the network, or the series itself. (For example, when a woman is trying to commit suicide by jumping into a bathtub with a television playing The Three Stooges , Addison says, "The Stooges? are you nuts? The network'll never let you do that, lady!") Variations of this technique had been used previously in television programs such as Burns and Allen and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis , although Moonlighting was the first scripted television series to weave self-referential dialogue directly into the show's plot.
Also unlike the earlier shows, Moonlighting sometimes broke the fourth wall in much more involved and complex ways. Cold opens sometimes featured Shepherd and Willis (in character as Maddie Hayes and David Addison), other actors, viewers or TV critics directly addressing the audience about the show's production itself. In some other episodes, the plot suddenly transitioned into extended sequences which involved crew dismantling or changing the sets, characters wandering off the set into other parts of the studio, production crew stepping into the scene as a deus ex machina (e.g. a propmaster suddenly walking into the scene and taking the villain's gun away), or guest actors dropping character and referring to each other by their real names. However, other than in stand-alone openings, the main actors never stepped out of character during the episodes.
Fantasy
The series also embraced fantasy; in season two, the show aired "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice", an episode that featured two lengthy and elaborately produced black and white dream sequences. The episode was about a murder that had occurred in the 1940s that David and Maddie are told about by the inheritor of the then-famous nightclub where the murder had taken place. Maddie and David feud over the details of the crime, which involve a man and woman who were executed for the death of the woman's husband, with both claiming the other was the real killer and had implicated the other out of spite. After a fourteen minute set-up sequence, the show switched to two black and white dream sequences where the two dreamed their version of how the murder took place. The two sequences were filmed on different black and white film stock so that they would look like true period films. (On the commentary on the DVD it is said that they used black and white film instead of color so that the network wouldn't later use the color film).
ABC was still displeased with the episode, however, and fearing fan reaction to a popular show being shown in black and white, demanded a disclaimer be made at the beginning of the episode to inform viewers of the "black and white" gimmick for the episode. The show's producers hired Orson Welles to deliver the introduction, which aired a few days after the actor's death.
Another famous fantasy episode was "Atomic Shakespeare", which featured the cast performing a variation of The Taming of the Shrew , with David in the role of Petruchio, Maddie as Katharina, Agnes as Bianca and Herbert as Lucentio. The episode featured Shakespearean costumes and mixed the Shakespearean plot with humorous anachronisms and variations on Moonlighting' s own running gags—including David riding in as Petruchio on a horse with BMW logos embroidered on its saddle blanket and repeatedly launching into the wrong Shakespearean soliloquy until the rest of the cast corrects him on which play he's in, and the Blue Moon office itself serving as Petruchio and Katharina's estate. The episode was wrapped by segments featuring a boy imagining the episode's proceedings because his mother forced him to do his homework instead of watching Moonlighting , which the mother described as "That show about two detectives? A man and a woman? And they argue all the time and all they really want to do is sleep together? Sounds like trash to me!"
Other
In addition, the show mocked its connection to the popular Remington Steele series by having Pierce Brosnan hop networks and make a cameo appearance as Steele in one episode. The show also acknowledged Hart to Hart as an influence: in the episode "It's a Wonderful Job", based on the film It's a Wonderful Life , Maddie's guardian angel showed her an alternate reality in which Jonathan and Jennifer Hart from the earlier series had taken over Blue Moon's lease. Although Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers did not appear in the episode, Lionel Stander reprised his role as the Harts' assistant Max.
Both Shepherd and Willis sang musical numbers over the course of the show. In "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice", Shepherd performed both "Blue Moon" in Maddie's dream sequence and The Soft Winds' "I Told Ya I Love Ya, Now Get Out!" in David's, while in "Atomic Shakespeare", Willis sings The Young Rascals' "Good Lovin'". Willis also frequently broke into shorter snippets of Motown songs. "Good Lovin'", "Blue Moon" and "I Told Ya I Love Ya..." appeared on the show's soundtrack album.
The episode "Big Man on Mulberry Street" centers around a big production dance number set to the Billy Joel song of the same name. The sequence was directed by veteran musical director Stanley Donen.
Casting
Glenn Gordon Caron had to fight with ABC to put Willis in the lead role. having already signed Shepherd for both the pilot and series. Caron claims he tested Willis about a third of the way through testing over 2,000 actors, knew "this was the guy" immediately, and had to fight through twice as many more acting tests and readings while arguing with ABC executives before receiving (initial) conditional authorization to cast Willis in the pilot. ABC, according to Caron, did not feel that anyone viewing would credit there could possibly be any "believable" sexual tension between Shepherd and Willis.
Caron was at the same time developing a one hour dramedy, College Blues , and was interested in casting Willis in the lead role of a "cool" college dean balancing his love life, academic career and managing the antics of his old fraternity (shades of Animal House ), but Willis was decidedly more interested in Moonlighting . Caron then tried to snag John Ritter for the lead role in College Blues , but Ritter had already committed to Hooperman , thus killing the series.
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