3 out of 5

Created by: Glenn Gordon Caron

covers season 1 – 5

Once my Bruce Willis love had been triggered during a middle school viewing of Die Hard 2 at a friend’s house, it was hard to connect the frequently bloodied, always swearing and snarking action star version of Willis with the goofy guy I was pretty sure was on that romcom mystery series I used to watch with my folks as an even younger youngster.

Of course, it really wasn’t hard to connect the two: Bruce was instantly in command of the persona that he would flex across a lot of his greatest roles, and the man-child-reluctantly-spurred-to-fight-back and never-serious-smart-aleck are key components of both that person and the defining traits of David Addison in Moonlighting, you just slant the whole thing towards screwball over cynicism. I don’t mean to compress the successes of Bruce down to a single shtick, but I also don’t think it’s radical to suggest that what catapulted him to fame at the box office worked very similarly on the small screen: he’s a perfect everyman, everyman-warts and all, and the skill of the actor (and writers and directors supporting him) is knowing how to shift that along various axes to make it work.

Pairing him with very much not everywoman Maddie Hayes – Cybill Shepherd – falls into typical odd couple pairings, but with further fortunes that heightened the potential output of the formula: the frame of the show is a starlet fallen on bad times, and Shepherd’s status as a star before Moonlighting added a metaness to the casting that ripples through the screen. Splash in the chemistry she clearly had with Bruce (and/or animosity – both serve the needed purposes), and the whole concept of said starlet having to fall back on paycheck-to-paycheck work with hack detective Addison is an elevator pitch that, once you see the two on screen together, is immediately perfect.

…This is also the problem with Moonlighting.

Moonlighting is a show that’s reliant entirely on vibes to sell it, and it’s at its best – sometimes, if rarely, for whole episodes; often for at least moments of any given episode – when playing into those vibes: a mish-mash of camp and classic Hollywood in terms of tone, and the pushing on the extremes of its leads’ personalities to go surprisingly far with, for the time, progressive subject matter and the 4th wall breaks / structural hijinx for which the show rightly became known. However, every other moment saved for, like, plot, relies on writing that really just isn’t there, and attempts to fluff up the repartee and romance with some legit characterization lead to some really painfully regressive stuff, where Addison gets jealous and stomps off all pout pout, then Maddie apologizes for no reason, and we go ’round and ’round with high school dramatics that never develop so much as stall for when the duo will inevitably kiss. The show often gets criticized for its 4th and 5th seasons which take place after that kiss, as a post-Happy Days prodigal example of Jumping The Shark, but in truth, the couple had smooched in a few variations prior to that point, with the show arguably already declining in season 3, as the magic really was created in hanging around in the innocence of the back and forth, and as soon as the writers started feigning towards more dramatic will-they-won’t-theys, I realize it was good for ratings, but if you’re watching it now… it’s a big eye roll. (Furthermore, season 4 was affected by Bruce’s Die Hard stardom and Cybill’s real life pregnancy, requiring some side character focused that made any hope of recovering in season 5 even more distant.)

To start, though, Moonlighting was a mystery-of-the-week series that relied heavily on the intercutting banter between Blue Moon Detective Agency head PI Addison and, in a roundabout attempt to recoup some money after being swindled out of her fortunes, ex-model-turned-detective Maddie Hayes. The specifics of this pairing are a lot of fun, but even in the pretty moody 2-hour debut film that kicks off the series, writer / creator Glenn Gordon Caron doesn’t care as much for the details of the mystery-of-the-week bit as much as what opportunities it offers his lead odd couple for bickering. And y’know what? it’s a pretty magical (im)balance. Because Bruce and Cybill, at odds behind the scenes pretty early on, master the patter, and each have a willingness to play into their own stereotypes (and being playful with the same hetero norms that would eventually get cringey), it’s almost kind of funny how poorly written the rest of the stuff is, lampshading that eps feature “action” or chases by default. We weren’t quite sinking into Police Squad! parody, but it was a brilliant wrinkle to get damn close to that while otherwise striking a pose of a Columbo show.

Season 2 is even more confident with this, going even bigger with full-on 4th wall breaks and setting changeups (like the 40s noir, black and white The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice), and finding a sweet spot where the show can flex between pretty straight forward stuff and sudden goofballness. …But season 3’s opener is where the creators thought pushing the character development along would be a desirable progression, leading to one of the driest episodes up to that point, ridiculous almost back to front in terms of David’s and Maddie’s behaviors as adults, and towards each other, and establishing a new normal where, week-to-week, you weren’t sure if you’d be getting silly or serious Moonlighting. From afar, that’s kinda fun, and you can see how that’s even intriguing when you were truly just waiting and seeing; later, with the whole series in the rearview, and DVDs (and later streaming) allowing for bingeing, it makes these blips more clearly the sore, sagging spots of the show.

The last two seasons, mentioned above but almost rarely discussed or considered in best-of lists for the show, aren’t bad if you’re accepting of the limitations – mainly season 4’s lack of focus on Bruce and Maddie exclusively, and season 5’s almost revisionist attempts to reclaim the show’s lost popularity, but not sidestep story / character decisions made to that point; there’s even a world where the series had one more season to get back on its feet and refound its confidence. But, again, you can just feel the magic slipping earlier than that, and it’s pretty impressive the show was allowed to make it that far.

I mentioned, though, that Moonlighting also manages to be at its best quite frequently, if fleetingly. Whenever I rewatch this series, I go through a pretty standard spin cycle of being elated by those moments – the super fast-paced cross-cutting dialogue; Bruce smirking after some clever double entendre; Cybill’s nonplused reactions, often followed by a quick and smartly delivered cut-down; and the show knowing how and when to embrace its own self awareness of not being a great mystery show – and then when the sax kicks in and we get a bit too flirty, or too soap opera, or that self awareness is tanked for a really dismissive non-ending, my feelings get deflated.

Moonlighting is undeniably game-changing for TV. It’s also… y’know, just okay as a show overall, though.