Moonlighting
Revisited:
From Hit to Writers Strike Casualty
“It’s
you. You came back. Finally. Some of them said you might not want to,
but I knew you’d come back…and now you’re here. Our
audience.”
Thus began
the final season of Moonlighting, the 1980s dramedy that rose
to hit status only to crash and burn in the span of a scant sixty-six
episodes spread out over five seasons. That fifth season was delayed
until December 6, 1988, due to a strike by the Writers Guild of America,
and the long hiatus is considered one of the primary reasons for the
show’s quick ratings erosion and eventual cancellation six months
later. At its prime, however, Moonlighting was the epitome
of the “quality TV” renaissance of the 1980s, with densely-layered
dialogue recited in a rapid-paced torrent by Cybill Shepherd and Bruce
Willis, an old Hollywood stylistic approach and a combination of comedy
and drama, romance and sexual innuendo, slapstick and whimsy.
Loosely
disguised as a detective series, the show centered around former fashion
model Maddie Hayes (Shepherd), who finds herself teamed with wisecracking
David Addison (Willis) at the Blue Moon Detective Agency when she loses
her life’s savings in an embezzlement scam. In reality, however,
it was the romantic tension between the two lead characters, played
out in a sexual dance of verbal sparring and foreplay with the occasional
slammed door thrown in for good measure, that drove the series. Creator
Glenn Gordon Caron took that premise even further by adding a “Battle
of the Sexes” element to the tension: Maddie Hayes was an intelligent,
independent modern woman while David Addison was a smug, self-assured
chauvinist. Moonlighting was able to walk the line between
its romantic comedy tendencies and detective series roots by involving
Blue Moon in cases that allowed for an exploration of those sexual differences.
The season
two episode “The Bride of Tupperman” is a classic example.
Alan Tupperman comes into Blue Moon under the pretext of hiring the
agency to locate a missing person, but in actuality wants them to find
the perfect would-be wife instead. Although Hayes is initially reluctant
to take the case, Addison—with visions of a large paycheck stuck
in his head—eventually persuades her, but it’s not until
Hayes reads Tupperman’s list of qualities (and Addison responds),
that the real battle begins: “Hard worker” (“someone
to do the ironing”); “good listener” (“follows
orders, that’s important”); “doesn’t overdress”
(“wears just enough to keep out of jail”); “has spent
time serving others” (“cocktail waitress, good, something
to fall back on during hard times”).
Because
of these interpretive differences, the two detectives decide to each
find a mate for Tupperman on their own, and the results are predictable;
Hayes picks a homely-looking Rhodes Scholar, while Addison’s choice
is a tall, sexually-smoldering redhead. From there the episode evolves
into a Preston Sturges-style screwball comedy, another Moonlighting
staple. “Tupperman picked the redhead; no, he picked the scholar;
no, he picked them both and already has a wife.” Hayes and Addison
fly to Connecticut to confront their bigamist client, only to discover
he is hospitalized from a car accident that has left his red-headed
“wife” dead—it turns out that Tupperman invented a
fictional spouse for himself years ago, took out an insurance policy
on her and now needed a corpse in order to collect. Hayes and Addison
eventually capture the culprit in a slapstick-style wheelchair chase
through a hospital that ends at the bottom of a stairwell.
“The
Bride of Tupperman” contains one additional classic Moonlighting
ingredient—the breaking down of the “fourth wall.”
When Addison explains Tupperman’s murderous insurance scam, for
example, he states he figured it out “during the commercial break.”
Throughout its five-year run, the series continuously made such self-referential
comments, even going so far as to have the characters talk directly
to the camera (and thus the audience). It started out as a way to pad
episodes that ran short, with opening sequences involving Shepherd and
Willis, in character as Hayes and Addison, answering viewer mail or
discussing winning only one Emmy despite twelve nominations, and eventually
evolved from there.
Moonlighting
had a flair for experimentation, and some of its best episodes reflect
this. In “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice” the detective
duo stumble across a murder from the 1940s, and both Hayes and Addison
dream different versions of the crime in elaborately-produced, black-and-white
homages to MGM and Warner Brothers. “Atomic Shakespeare,”
arguably the greatest episode of any television series, is a whimsical
re-telling of William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew,
spoken with a “hip” iambic pentameter. And in “The
Straight Poop,” real-life Hollywood gossip columnist Rona Barrett
visits Blue Moon in order to report on the headline-grabbing feud between
Hayes and Addison; the episode is also a veiled attempt at an inside
joke, however, as Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis were the true headline
grabbers with their supposed on-and-off-set squabbling.
Although
a typical television series consist of twenty-two episodes, Moonlighting
was never able to deliver more than eighteen in any of its five seasons,
and the backstage bickering of Shepherd and Willis did indeed play a
role. The series also had to overcome obstacles like Shepherd’s
pregnancy and a Willis skiing accident that limited scenes for both
of them. More significantly, the dialogue-heavy scripts and stylistic
production demands meant that completing episodes often took longer
than with typical shows, resulting in a large amount of repeats that
tried its audience’s patience. The initial “will-they-or-won’t-they”
hook lost steam when Hayes and Addison “did” at the end
of season three, and working Shepherd’s pregnancy into season
four muddled the situation even more. The writers strike then eroded
the show’s already shrinking ratings when it forced season four
to end prematurely and delayed season five by months.
The final
nail in the coffin, however, was Caron’s decision to leave the
show at the start of what would be the final season. The creator had
been such an instrumental part of the series, supervising every production
detail and line of dialogue, that a season five without him fell flat,
missing that special “zip” that Caron was able to provide.
Moonlighting still went out on its own terms, however, using
the last ten minutes of the final episode to again break the “fourth
wall” when Hayes and Addison are confronted with their own demise.
In an act of desperation, they approach a Hollywood producer for assistance
in saving the show, but are met with the following negative response
instead:
“Even
I can’t get people to tune in to watch what they don’t want
to watch anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I love you two guys. But
can you really blame the audience? A case of poison ivy is more fun
that watching you two lately….People fell in love with the two
of you falling in love, but you couldn’t keep falling forever.
Sooner or later you had to land someplace.”
For Moonlighting,
that “place of landing” was in the pantheon of television
history, as this all-too-short-lived series played a significant part
in elevating the medium to higher levels than it had gone before. Thank
the stars (and the moon) for that.
December
17, 2007
