Moonlighting

When I started classes at University of Maryland, College Park, in fall 1986, I noticed a remarkable thing.  For the first time since January 1979, I was finally able to see new TV shows as they aired.  Since moving to Paris way back then, all I could see were summer re-runs or long-stale shows – “Mork and Mindy” or the AFN TV shows, with the big exception of the 1984 Olympics in L.A., which were obviously live.  One of the shows I did watch on my small TV in Hagerstown Hall, or the large TV in the common area of my 7^th floor dorm hall, was “Moonlighting”.  I can’t say I caught every episode or watched it diligently (I still can’t remember what night of the week it was on) but it was one of the few shows I did watch.

 Now, thanks to the marvel of DVDs, I finished watching all five seasons of the show, from start to finish.  It originally ran from 1985 to 1989, covering the second half of the 1980s.  This was Bruce Willis’ major beginning in show business, although “Die Hard” (the first movie) was done before the series ended.

 Premise.  Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) is a retired model who wakes up one day to discover that her accountant embezzled practically all of her money and fled to South America.  Instead of being able to live off her accumulated wealth, she now has to work for a living – again.  She’s too old to work as a model, but her lawyer lets her know about one business she owns, a detective agency, which is nothing more than a passive loss generator to shield her investment income from tax liability.  The agency had hired a full staff of lazy bums whose job it is to siphon money and pretend to work.  Now she has to actually earn an income from this place, which she renamed “Blue Moon”.

 The guy running this is David Addison (Bruce Willis).  Given that his erstwhile task was pretending to work, Maddie’s initial impression of him is negative, and his ne’er-do-well attitude simply confirms her suspicion that he’s an irresponsible loser.  “Love at First Hate” rears its ugly head once again:  eventually his charm gets under her skin.  He’s actually not a bad private detective (Willis himself had worked as one in real life prior to this acting role) and together they solve a whole bunch of colorful mysteries while bickering non-stop.  They’re not particularly memorable, and even the “private eye plot twists” are common enough to be recognized fairly soon and often.  

 The real meat of the show is the chemistry and mutual antagonism between David and Maddie.  It’s very much Apollo (reason and logic – Maddie) vs. Dionysus (love and random chance – David).  But the clashing and inconsistent personalities, even disagreeing on which cases to accept, manage to complement each other when it comes time to actually solve cases.  The humor is also irreverent; Willis and Shepherd sometimes talk to the audience, and a few times the camera actually pans out to the set.

 They’re assisted by Agnes DiPesto (Allyce Beasley) the shy receptionist who answers the phone with an overlong rhyme, and (introduced in later seasons, winding up as a romantic partner to Agnes) Bert Viola (Curtis Armstrong, probably best known as “Booger” from the “Revenge of the Nerds” trilogy).  These two assume greater importance in season 4, when Maddie runs off to Chicago to see her parents because she’s pregnant and has no clue what to do about it.

 By season 5 the show had “jumped the shark” and run out of steam.  After having chosen David over Sam (Mark Harmon) then married Walter Bishop – and getting a rapid annulment of their Vegas marriage – Maddie STILL can’t make up her mind about David, who then has a brief affair with Maddie’s cousin (Virginia Masden).  This is also despite Maddie’s immense jealousy of Terri (Brooke Adams), a single pregnant mother who David assists in her pregnancy while Maddie is hiding in Chicago.  Rhett and Scarlett married, Han and Leia marry, but these two?  NO!  Enough already, pull the plug:  which they did.

 Notable episodes.  My favorite was the “Taming of the Shrew” adaptation.  I’d cite the “Honeymooners” homage, except that I’m not a big “Honeymooners” fan.  Another was the precursor to “Look Who’s Talking” (the movie in which Willis acts as the voice of a baby), sure enough Willis plays the baby in Maddie’s womb.  Though since the baby was Sam’s....

 I’d invite anyone with a nostalgia for ‘80s TV to watch, as not only were the shows fun and entertaining (if a little frustrating towards the end when David and Maddie STILL don’t hook up conclusively) but you can recognize a fair amount of other actors and actresses and even some cameos.