I feel like I’ve been traveling back it time this past week, binge-watching the 1980s TV show Moonlighting, while I wait for my latest Other Worldly novel, Aliens Watch, to come back from my editor. In some remembered ways, it stood the test of time. In others, it disappointingly did not. What a bombastic eye-opener it has been.
Ironically, Aliens Watch features the subject of time travel, as does a fantastic debut novel I’m currently devouring, which will be the subject of next week’s blog post. This week, I immersed in nostalgia, reliving my 1980s time as a newlywed residing in military housing on Oahu in Hawaii.
Revisiting Moonlighting, at least initially, was actually excellent fodder for getting in the groove to write rapid-fire dialog between a couple with colorful and chaotic chemistry for my next novel. Previously, I found The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ideal for drafting comedic banter among multiple family members. I’ve already watched that entire and entirely marvelous show more than once. The kind of entertainment, like Moonlighting, that you miss long after it’s gone, and long fervently for more of.
But it took four decades for Moonlighting to reappear on TV, which is why, perhaps, I didn’t recall so much of its five seasons from 1985 to 1989. I’m 63 now; I was one month shy of 24 when it debuted. And maybe I simply missed seeing episodes when they originally aired on Tuesday, and later Friday, nights. Most bewildering is I didn’t remember the names of the main characters, but I did recall who starred in it.
I’ve been watching the show for free on Tubi, but apparently it first became available in October 2023 via Hulu. So I went digging to find out why it took so long to reemerge and learned much I did not know, but first some background refresher.
Moonlighting was a comedy-drama created by Glenn Gordon Caron, who also wrote episodes early on. It starred Cybill Shepherd as Maddie Hayes, Bruce Willis as David Addison, and Allyce Beasley as Agnes Di Pesto, all working in Los Angeles at Blue Moon Investigations. A struggling detective agency owned by Hayes, a former model (like Shepherd herself). The fourth season introduced new cast member Curtis Armstrong, of Risky Business and Revenge of the Nerds fame, as Herbert Viola.
It premiered March 3, 1985 on ABC with a feature-length pilot episode. As I watched the tedious 90-plus minutes last week, I realized I’d never seen it before. Probably because that day was my first wedding anniversary and I’m pretty sure we went out to dinner in Honolulu. Anyway, unlike the rest of the first-season episodes, the pilot was plodding and boring, with odd, unnecessary footage.
Moonlighting’s pilot definitely did not employ what much of season one did, the screenwriting adage to enter a scene late and leave early. Episodes often end after a dramatic scene, without showing mundane, pesky details of the cleanup or aftermath.
I did, however, learn from the pilot why the detective agency was called Blue Moon. Apparently Maddie Hayes was made most famous via ads for a shampoo of the same name. She was the Blue Moon girl, kind of like the 70’s Breck girl. Also, she lost millions to an embezzling accountant and therefore had to reinvent herself and reinvigorate her finances via Blue Moon Investigations.
Moonlighting, once it picked up steam in episodes following the plodding pilot, often incorporated zany fantasy sequences, and frequently broke what’s known as the “fourth wall,” an invisible barrier that is supposed to separate the audience from the action. This started off as cute and clever, but toward the end of reliving the second season, I began to find it ridiculous and downright lazy of the writers/producers.
Hence, what I learned about Moonlighting from online articles was quite telling. It was only popular in its early years, a critical hit that received 16 Emmy nominations—yet no wins—in 1986 for its second season. Its ratings declined in later seasons, and the show was cancelled in 1989 after Shepherd gave birth to twins and Willis had skyrocketed to movie-star fame with 1988’s Die Hard.
By the final season ending May 1989, I’d already moved to Monterey in 1987 and moved again to started law school in Baltimore in August 1989, so I saw little of it. My favorite episode occurred in 1988 in the middle of third season, titled “Atomic Shakespeare.” A delightful and deviously deviant take on The Taming of the Shrew that was deemed “ahead of its time.”
But as I rewatched (most of) season three earlier this week, I began to develop my own theories about why ratings tanked, which I’ll get to momentarily. First, interesting tidbits learned from Vanity Fair and Vulture pieces published last October.
Moonlighting wasn’t syndicated, and got held up in “licensing purgatory” for years by “complicated music rights issues.” Not surprising. The show had everything from “Blue Moon” (sung by Shepherd) and “Singing In The Rain” to Broadway classics and classical staples, not to mention Motown and various pop hits performed over several decades, with copyrighted lyrics belted out by Willis.
It was lauded for breaking all the rules, but also broke its budget, and made a household name out of Bruce Willis. Which made it bittersweet to watch now, knowing he suffers from a early-onset dementia.
I learned how Moonlighting was one of the first primetime shows to “really defy genre, alternating from screwball antics to romantic melodrama to clever mysteries.” But, late in the second season, the production was “struggling to keep up with restrictions of basically writing a feature-film’s worth of fast-paced dialogue every week, leading to delayed episodes and filler material.” Why? Because “Willis and Shepherd sped through dialog like Hepburn and Grant.”
I love the speedy, wickedly witty repartee, and can certainly appreciate what it means to defy genre, having done a bit of that with my Other Worldly novel series. But, by the third season, banter between Hayes and Addison becomes agitating, as opposed to entertaining. It’s caustic, shrill, and audibly annoying. Almost as if the actors were fed up with their scenes, each other, and the show. Maybe they were bummed they didn’t win an Emmy for the second season when they should have.
In any event, the tension between the actors and writers/producers, mentioned in one online article and blatantly addressed in a season three episode that obliterated the “fourth wall,” seems Wars of the Roses real and not at all refreshing. For several episodes prior, I also wondered where those “clever mysteries” went.
I like that Moonlighting took on the subject of workplace sexual harassment and gender discrimination with attempted humor and achieved acerbic snark, but one thing made me stop watching late in the third season, having sensed it by the end of the second. One or more of the writers (there were now many names other than Glenn Gordon Cary credited) was intent on pushing their bombastic brand of religious doctrine, and not at all subtly.
It wasn’t just religion or a belief in their god, and it wasn’t just Christianity. It was Catholicism. Chilling, and all too much like today’s not-so-supreme, Federalist-Society-controlled SCOTUS. Cue the Heritage Foundation and MAGA’s Project 25.
Was I aware of it then? The blatant blaming of the female for all that ails in life or on a TV show? I don’t recall being so, but it screamed quite loudly and alarmingly to me this week. No wonder their ratings plummeted, I thought. This blatantly sanctimonious drivel, this portentous moralizing, squelched creative spark straight into patriarchal TV purgatory.
Late in the second season, Maddie Hayes refers to her banter with David Addison as “conversational hari-kari.” I’d say the writers/producers did that to the entire show by foisting their religious dogma on a populace that expected comedic genius, not gobsmacking, misogynist male-god-morality-pushing.
I mentioned loving Moonlighting in my third Other Worldly novel, Aliens Abound, when protagonist Rowan Layne decides to write a blog called Moonliving while visiting Earth’s moon. She considers the chosen title to be a play on words, evoking the beloved 80s show. But she had not yet had a chance to rewatch those fondly remembered episodes. Perhaps she’ll see it differently now.
In the upcoming Aliens Watch, it’s kind of ironic that I tackle the tricky early years of my marriage in Hawaii, exactly when those first two seasons of Moonlighting aired. I saw no correlation between my life and subjects addressed on the show then, but I sure do now, nearly forty years later. So much of it I had yet to live through, or understand, including sexual workplace harassment and gender discrimination. The 1980s seem so very naïve and superficial to me now.
Shows like Moonlighting come along only once in a blue moon, and even it could not sustain its creative luster over time, or even at the time. My marriage lasted until late into the 1990s, but it was ultimately not sustainable either, yet not for sexist reasons.
After the week and recent episodes we’ve endured in real life, here’s hoping our democracy can sustain and stand the test of time. If not, we could be catapulted back to the 1880s, not the 1980s, because what Republicans have planned in 2025 via Project 25 is no joke, no fictitious, fun-loving TV fantasy. It’s not moonlighting, it’s gaslighting, anti-feminist fascism.