The Gem of “Moonlighting”: A Case for Nameless Genres and the Acting Prowess of Bruce Willis
An ode to the film noir-inspired, stream of consciousness-infused, semi-satirical, semi-Shakespearean, ultra-chic, sexually charged, screwball-turned-tragicomedy made for extreme romantics.
Warning: The following contains mild to moderate spoilers for the first three and a half seasons of the television series Moonlighting (1985-1989), which will shortly be coming to streaming.
This essay owes a great deal to Scott Ryan’s Moonlighting: An Oral History (2021) and Grace Chivell and Shawna Saari’s ongoing podcast on the show.
Long live the Moonlighting renaissance.
From 3.13, “Maddie’s Turn to Cry”: Maddie goes to David’s house at night (and learns he has no furniture).
Smears of smoke shade patrons in a downtown L.A. bar out on the prowl for their next pick-up, masking shame in dusky smudges. The texture is Degas, the mood a taste of Prohibition but amidst the crowd shimmery shantung sleeves graze charcoal sharkskin suits. Bounciful blonde waves and restless perms stride as the Pet Shop Boys croon of “a West End town, a dead-end World… East End boys and West End girls…”
It’s 1986 – and overconfidently a tall guy in a gray tie slips something to the bartender and offers in a raspy voice: “What do you say, we, er… send a bottle of somethin’ nice to the lady in the silver dress.”
From afar we gauge a glimpse of her: luminous locks of honeyed waves, cherry-red lipstick and a plunging neckline satin floor-length gown. His bottle of Cristal or Veuve Clicquot or Pérignon arrives, much to her date’s dismay. She rises to approach him. Dimples crease the cheeks of David Addison as he mouths “Wow…”, giving the lady the once-over. Annoyance gnaws at her. “What are you, stupid?” she demands to know. “I’m working.” But David has a gift: a parcel wrapped in shiny pink that hides an intricately crafted lilac pocketbook.
“You could jam a nightie in there if you had to,” he insists – for nighties form a part of this young woman’s (nightly) nine-to-five: she is a high-end hooker.1
He’s no undercover cop. Or john. Or envious ex-boyfriend. David’s a private eye – but he is using Toby to get tipoffs on potential murders from a regular of hers: some poor somniloquist oblivious to his side gig as a police informant.
It isn’t clout that David seeks – although the money couldn’t hurt – no, David wants to prove his boss – ex-model-turned-investor-turned-proprietor of the Blue Moon Detective Agency, the supercilious Maddie Hayes – woefully wrong about his reputation as a P.I. “One case does not a detective make,” she has insisted, time after time – despite never herself uncovering the truth without some flash-in-the-pan fortune: the kind that usually embroils the pair in crazy car chases and slapstick pratfalls, saxophone-backed almost-kisses and the haze of dreams.
They’re plunged into superior realms: a renovated tale of film noir sultriness one night; a rescribed Taming of the Screw another. The theme from Rocky plays throughout a gender-switching parody while Hitchcock’s Vertigo motif haunts villains in another episode; Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke forms the stylistic backdrop of a musical two-parter. Scripts are riddled with both satires and homages to U.S. cinema and tv: from The Honeymooners to Poltergeist; the MGM musical to It’s a Wonderful Life and (of course) Casablanca.
He is Bruce Willis, and she is Cybill Shepherd, and this is Moonlighting: a mega worldwide hit that made the former’s stardom; an intense, peripatetic twist on everything tv.
Elasticity extends this series – which lasted just four years from 1985–89 – outside the reach of cultural critics. It’s a smorgasbord of schmalz and censorable double entendres; a sensual array of film’s fluidity. At times it seems to be foreshadowing the color palettes in the movies of auteur Krzysztof Kieślowski, who likely never heard of it. It forges a relationship with viewers hitherto and since unfelt through metatextual asides and monologues; it channels the dynamic shared between Hepburn and Tracy whilst embarking on the risqué repartee of Bogart and Bacall.
Characterized by chaos, Moonlighting surfaced as a sumptuous mess. Executives at ABC had plagued Glenn Gordon Caron – a twenty-nine-year-old ambitious screenwriter out to make movies – with the unenviable task of writing yet another “boy-girl detective show.” No supplication could convince the network to back down, so Caron opted to lampoon the genre. The female lead had been selected from the start – The Last Picture Show and Taxi Driver star, ex-model Cybill Shepherd – but the rugged male protagonist was a whole other story. Three thousand actors read for the delicious role of David Addison2: a hedonistic layabout in charge of a detective agency that comfortably “lost money great”.3
Pervasively loquacious, the one hundred twenty-page pilot teleplay tripped up all thespians auditioning but three, among whom was a guy “[with] a shaved head and all these earrings, and he was wearing combat fatigues…” Caron later remembered. “I turned to the other people and I said, ‘That’s him.’ – ‘Him?’ the unimpressed execs snapped.4 They thought he had been pointing to another actor altogether. No, stressed Caron – he’d meant him: a twenty-nine-year-old then understudying for Ed Harris in Fool for Love on Broadway; the college dropout, ex-security guard, fun-loving babe magnet who would one day refuse to die hard.
No, execs insisted – no way. “Obviously you don’t know what a leading man is," casting director Reuben Cannon was lectured by Tony Thomopoulos, president of the broadcast group, shortly before being fired. Another time he swore off: “I don’t want to hear about this Bruce Willis guy; he’s dead to me.”5
Eleven times Caron was forced to bring the actor to audition before network heads. Eleven times they turned him down. Caron eyed alternatives – could they arrange a screen test? Yes, but now another stumble: Shepherd balked at the idea for fear of getting fired prior to production. Another actress was hired. The snippet was shown to a focus group; they weren’t sure. Thirty-five thousand dollars had been spent (over a hundred grand today). Shepherd was finally persuaded. Would they reshoot the screen test? No way. More rope was yanked by parties in this tug of war. Eventually Ann Daniel – one of the two women in a major post at ABC – appraised the eye-catching young fellow as “a dangerous f**k.”
The men in the room were appalled.6
Relishable roles like David didn’t come along too often on tv. Amidst its streams of static scowling private eyes, this ogling hunk stood on an office desk in sunglasses and a Hawaiian lei to sing into an emptied toilet paper roll, “All around the limbo world… gonna do the limbo rock…”. One morning he is found beneath his desk in nothing but an undershirt and boxers patterned with red hearts, a chain with a pig ornament adangle from his ear.7 When Maddie – stern and stone-like in her stubbornness – insists they have no commonality, he pleads his case whilst walking backward, flapping his excited hands in that forever-antsy Willis way:
“You like meatballs on your spaghetti, right? Me too. How about books – let’s talk about books. Me, I read left to right – how about you? Is that an amazing coincidence or what?! You wanna get deep – let’s talk about sex. Who’d a guessed…” (he touches his lapel with mock surprise, daredevil eyes): “I like sex too!”8
David’s receptionist Agnes Dipesto – played to an apex of comedic genius by Allyce Beasley – is an often-lovestruck sweetheart with a crazy mane of black curls and dark oval bulging eyes and a small piccolo-like breathy voice that answers every phone call with a rhyme:
“Blue Moon Detective Agency:
Have things gone awry?
Is it solutions you seek?
We’re eager to help,
but we’re closed a few weeks.
So if you’re despondent,
and you’re life’s out of whack,
we hope you’re still troubled
when we all get back.”
The agency’s work ethic comes as a culture shock for Maddie Hayes: a former model who’d invested in a slew of businesses – including a massage parlor and pet-grooming salon – to secure tax write-offs. Maddie has been scammed by an accountant who has fled with all her savings.
Clad in seashell necklaces and shiny shantung, candy pink satin and flared sleeves, she’s dressed like Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story quite anachronistically. Shepherd – herself a former model and winner of Miss Teenage America Pageant – had made tv, theatre, film and four recording albums by her thirties. Willis had starred in Off-Off-Broadway plays and played harmonica for fun. Strawberry blonde and boasting perfect bone structure, the actress had been raised as a religious Southern belle in Memphis, Tennessee.9 Willis – a shaved-head punk by choice – had been “Bruno the Bartender” during his time waiting tables at Café Central in Manhattan. Scrappiness defined him; co-stars Allyce Beasley and Curtis Armstrong and Moonlighting director Allan Arkush all agree that he was David Addison.10
The pair made for a duo disparate: two people who appear to have no mutuality at all; the premise on which Moonlighting exists. Willis would later relate the “real” screentest had happened “on the way up in the elevator. I was flirting with Cybill in a big way.”11
Electricity between these opposites made that apparent – warding off the plea Thomopoulos had made to Caron prior to the series’ shooting: “You can make the show, you can make it with him. But whatever you do, don’t let them get romantically involved.”12
The order seemed to have descended from the gods: Willis and Shepherd didn’t; David and Maddie met with obstacles in that department; viewers tuned in to observe Thomopoulos’ worst nightmare struggling to come true. Among its fans it is well known that Moonlighting is no detective series. “I believed very strongly that no one was tuning in for the cases,” Caron later explained.13
You don’t say.
Maddie Hayes meets Agnes Dipesto and David Addison. (1.1, Pilot).
Galvanic currents became overcharged as thunderstorms sparked glitches in the stars' ignition. Headstrong in their handling of the characters, Willis and Shepherd would engage in very serious disputes about how best to make the handling of a coffee pot comedic,14 Shepherd’s hairstyle15 or her co-star’s attitude (“I could stand up to Cybill and just say, ‘Look, this is the way things are, honey’”, Willis bragged back in the day).16 By the end of the first season – a brief spell of just six episodes – Caron was forced to turn to Shepherd and command, “You’ve got to behave,” before turning to Willis and equally urging, “And you’ve got to behave.”17
Tiffs seemed to fill the energy the actors needed for those arduous twenty-two-hour days of shooting.18 Reeling off an ambience of unreality, Moonlighting lives as a projection of experimental minds: David and Maddie endlessly talk over each other – sometimes in opposite time signatures. If Maddie tries to minuet her way through bullet points of arguments, David riffs jazzily in bebop beats; he’s an out-of-control trumpeter and she’s a cellist playing Bach’s basso continuos.
But sometimes they zap simultaneously and pause synchronically and whip up whip-smart rhythms.
Although most of the series’ episodes are credited to other writers, Caron rewrote the majority19 to fit a style specific: rhythms punctuated by repetitively slamming doors and yells of “Fine.” – “Fine.” – “Good.” – “Good.” that seem outdated in today’s too-naturalistic climate.
Yet throughout Moonlighting these tics and tantrums are not offshoots spawned from lazy scribes. Instead they’re used to manifest humanity’s predictability; intrepid habits hard-pressed to get lost. The persistence of the mind – its irreplaceable, implacable obsessiveness; the stomach’s gnarly knots; a person’s self-defeating dead-end escapades – arise not just in the aesthetic but a host of fantasies that echo throbs of the subconscious.
Among these the most celebrated is 2.4, “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice”: an instalment shot almost entirely in black and white and introduced by juggernaut director Orson Welles, who died a week after its airdate.20 In it David and Maddie hear about a 1940s murder spurred on by a lovers’ spat. Following an argument on which of them is “the real sexist”, each embarks on their envisionment of these events.
In Maddie’s world Rita’s a shy saloon singer styled by high necklines, white gloves and prim rolled hair. Rehearsing “Blue Moon” with an orchestra – a song performed by Shepherd with the silvery light tones of a Jo Stafford-like soprano – she’s startled to behold Bruce Willis sporting rolled-up sleeves and a fedora, storming in with a self-pleasing swagger. The blasé player offers up a ragtag melody of monikers: “Name’s Chance. Chance, Cash, Johnny, Brick, Lonesome, Shane, McCoy… But you can call me Zach.”
In her rendition she’s an innocent swept up into a sordid liaison coerced into her husband’s killing. David’s take on the sad tale sees the musician as a young romantic minding his own business, practicing on his cornet in a hotel room when the feisty Rita – now with a sweetheart neckline dress and loose hair and performing “I Told Ya, I Loved Ya, Now Get Out!” – sweeps in and ravishes the “victim”. This ravenous vixen controls all his thoughts, and he strolls in night’s naked street sullenly wondering: “How long would those [neon] signs float over my head?” (a tribute to a trope in film noir mimicked here).
Aesthetic contrasts, the two versions were designed stylistically to mirror the MGM musical and the Warner Bros., James Cagney style of film noir respectively.21 So determined was the team to print the story in a 1940s etiquette, they not only insisted on the episode being filmed in black and white but had to hire a “small, obscure MGM lab” to process it.22
Moonlighting never shies away from the relationship between opposing genres – melding Chopin’s Funeral March into the song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in “Knowing Her” (2.6), in which David accidentally drives a hearse into a baseball field’s refreshments stand. The irony of many of these cultural references was lost on certain viewers but, as writer Debra Frank explained, “20 million are watching… if 12 million get the joke, it’s okay.”23
“my name is Agnes, but my friends call me… Miss Dipesto.”
- The Blue Moon Receptionist
In “Big Man on Mulberry Street” (3.6) Maddie agonizes: David’s just told her he is shortly to attend his former brother-in-law’s funeral. Brother-in-law? Yes, he was married. Although David and Maddie are platonic at this point, the revelation sends her reeling.
Dreaming that night, she sees him dancing to the Billy Joel song in a sequence choreographed by Singin’ in the Rain Gene Kelly-collaborator, Stanley Donen. His partner – in the role of David’s imaginary ex-wife – is Bob Fosse favorite Sandahl Bergman. They’re in a downtown New York bar in front of 2D painted cardboard sets inspired by the fifties musical; their movement tells the story of the ex-wife dumping David for another man.
In fact, as we learn later, she betrayed him with a woman.
“Atomic Shakespeare” (3.7) – infamous for its madcap manifestation of The Taming of the Shrew, (the inspiration for the series)24 – begins by zooming out of the show’s credits till the Moonlighting title is shown on a real tv. Two-thirds of an apron-wearing woman perching both hands on her hips suffuse the screen.
“Mom, what are you doing?” A twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy complains. The mother chastens him: he should be studying for his Shakespeare test. In response we see a pair of dirty grayish sneakers dangling from a couch.
“But it’s Moonlighting,” insists the faceless boy.
She doesn’t understand.
“You know – the show about the two detectives – a man and a woman.”
“And they argue a lot, and all they really wanna do is sleep together?”
“Yea-ah!” he roars as though he’s just hit a home run.
“Sounds like trash to me,” she hastily dismisses. Begrudgingly the boy is forced to head upstairs; the camera trails his feet. A tuba grumpily pumps out the Moonlighting main theme at a discernibly slow pace as he sits down before a heavy volume of mahogany: “What a dra-ag,” he moans – and as he opens the book we are treated to a bustling film set; one that cost $3.5 million to make.25 Maddie is Katherine; David – with a stallion sporting sunglasses and BMW-insignia on its saddle – is Petruchio. Bruce Willis sings “Good Lovin” at their wedding, which sees her tied-up in duct tape and rope. It’s madness. It’s scribed in iambic pentameter. It bears no resemblance to the previous episodes; it’s lacking in a set of door slams and synchronic speech.
It’s Moonlighting.
Cracking compositions preferable for film and television, the series is deliberately unsettling. “I think… we’ve seen so much visual literature, that what we tend to do when something starts is [say], ‘Oh, yeah – I know what that is.’” Caron shared in 2007.26 Moonlighting defies viewers’ expectations in at least two-thirds of episodes. On one hand there are attributes immediately recognizable: a close-up following the legs of Maddie as she steps out of the elevator; her purposely unpressing inquiry of the receptionist – “Is Mr. Addison in yet?”; the pair’s rebuttals behind desks and at the wheel. The audience has a home: a zany bower in which Agnes states, “My name is Agnes, but my friends call me… Miss Dipesto…”27
It's a haunt that languishes in filmic luxury. Things can get serious. And when they do Moonlighting is imbued with beauty almost without parallel.
In the same episode that features a dance sequence, “Big Man on Mulberry Street,” Maddie flies to New York to accompany David to his ex-brother-in-law’s funeral. She’s sat in his hotel room and he doesn’t want her there. The façade is dunked in navy, making Shepherd’s sight a silhouette. Her flank is burnished by a brush of outdoor light that dips her cheek and locks in limber gold; her face blanched by the balm of a white pinch-pleat lampshade in the corner. Whooshes swept by passing cars and distant toots occasionally sound, but otherwise this episode is quiet. Intermittently we hear a melancholy stirring on a lonely alto sax.
David is mournful. Hard-pressed to confess to Maddie that his ex-wife left him for a “broad”, he tells of how he fearfully lost his virginity to her one rainy high school day, then walked home in regret.
Loaded inhalations intersperse his awkward chuckles and the tense extrusions of that crispy, slow-to-surface voice. “One side of my brain is saying, ‘You wanna work in a gas station for the rest of your life?’ ‘Cause that’s the story you always hear, right? Eighteen-year-old boy knocks up some girl, gets married and has to work in a gas station, right?’… So, I’m just walking around, while I’m walking around, in my head, I’m having a conversation with God. I’m saying, ‘God, please - please, I will never do it again, just – please – don’t let her get pregnant.’ And in my mind, all I see is me in a blue Sunoco uniform with ‘Dave’ stitched on the pocket. Anyway…” He scoffs and rattles off almost monotonously: “I guess God had something else on his mind.”
Throughout the series it’s apparent that a love of life can’t save David from loneliness. Willis plays a party animal restrained by a deep need to tend to someone. It’s almost as though David capers and plays pranks and comes in wearing “X-Ray vision” spectacles to cover half-stitched wounds.
Wanton eyes of open torment travel to observe his environs as he confides in somebody – in anybody – in an empty bar one night when Maddie has, as he would put it, gone completely “loco”. A remote shot captures David drowning his already-scotch-laced sorrows as a cleaner sweeps the floor; it must be four hours past closing time, if that.
Machoism chafes at drunkenness – the latter wins, and David clumsily confesses: “I’ve been… thinking, she’s gonna go for somebody – she should go for me…” (his voice becomes unnaturally high-pitched). “Not that – she has to go for me, I don’t – care about that.” (A contemplative pause). “Okay – all right, all right – I’m insecure – there.” Silence lines the premises as he addresses the now-absent cleaner: “Sure has calmed down here. You and me oughta get together and do this again, sometime, Stinky – we think alike.”28
When Frank Sinatra spoke of “a song that [makes you] go and weep in your wine,”29 he was referring to the likes of David Addison.
It’s no surprise then that when Maddie dates the suave Sam Crawford at the end of Season 3, David interrupts their dinner at a swanky, scarlet-enrobed restaurant. Pink roses on the table gleam amidst red globes of shine as tunes on the piano tinkle out “It Was a Very Good Year” and “Moon River.”
Tropes are subverted – as is par for the course. Sitting with Maddie and Sam, David gets hammered and doesn’t tell Maddie he loves her.30
Fantasy is tantalizing in the series not only through fiction atop fiction but the craft of fabricated realness: the fact that Shepherd’s face is shot through a diffusion filter on the camera lens in seasons 1-4 – a luminous effect that often leaves her with a golden halo;31 the fact that colors drip indulgently into each other in the backdrop: a black Manhattan fire escape blends into a block of black brick after black brick after black brick…32
There is all that – and then there are the workers: a whole band who never do yet vehemently strike in 4.8, “Father Knows Last” (“No Work and Pay!” “No Work and Pay!” they chant). There’s a phone call to the counter terrorism hotline that proceeds like this33:
MADDIE: This is an emergency. I’d like to report an assassination plot which in a few hours will cause an international incident.
FRIENDLY FEMALE VOICE: In the future you can dial that number direct: the extension is 4-6-0-3. I’ll transfer you. [Sound of phone ringing].
VOICE OF SANGUINE MALE SEXAGENARIAN: You have reached the counter-terrorism hotline. All our lines are busy right now. Your call will be taken by the next available agent. [A jazzy instrumental of The Carpenters’ “Close to You” plays].
But there is no characteristic for which Moonlighting is more remembered than that frangible Fourth Wall: the characters of Bruce and Cybill beside David and Maddie. At the start of “Brother, Can You Spare a Blonde?” (2.1) the fictional counterparts stand and “welcome” us to the new season but – no, wait – they’re actually standing there because the episode’s too short; it has to be “sixty minutes – not fifty-nine minutes, not sixty-one minutes” – and they were lacking for dialogue, claims Maddie, because David talks too fast… That is, until a director yells off-camera: “Sorry, Cybill. Sorry, Bruce – too short.”
“Too short?!” Maddie-Cybill yells before they spat again, debating who’s at fault for this calamity. Bruce yells out “Karen – get my agent on the phone...” Madness precedes the show; the stars’ own reputations precede it. At the start of 3.12, “Maddie’s Turn to Cry,” people stopped at random on the street describe events that happened in the previous episode. As witnessed in the interactions between fans, the names “Cybill and Bruce” – which call to mind a quibbling couple at a country club soirée – are interchangeable with David and Maddie; almost exchangeable. It’s not that fans can’t tell the difference – we the viewers almost aren’t supposed to.
It's part and parcel of the show’s nudge-nudge-wink-wink aesthetic. The episode that sees David and Maddie at last “do it”, 3.14, “I Am Curious… Maddie” – named for an erotic 1967 Swedish film – was watched by sixty million viewers: 49% of that night’s television audience.34 It begins with a fake black and white “Movietone News” report shot in the style of wartime footage.
“World Waits for New Episode of Moonlighting,” reads the headline on shaky film. The White House is displayed – so are Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, a Thai Buddhist Temple… “News broke of one star’s pregnancy, and the other’s unfortunate luck on the icy slopes of Idaho,” the announcer informs, referring to Shepherd’s twin pregnancy and Willis’s skiing accident. “ABC Executives Dealt with the News in Their Own Way,” reads the next title card, revealing a short clip of burning coffins and a screaming jumper tumbling from a bridge…
Most salaciously, Moonlighting made its share of scintillating sexual references so “dangerous” to public welfare, it was felt, that writers were compelled to circumvent ABC’s censors by submitting their new episodes at the last minute – sometimes hours prior to their airing.35
The show’s creators didn’t want us not to be aware of this. In 2.8, “Portrait of Maddie,” David smirks knowingly at Maddie. “Get your hand off my behind,” she orders. David jerks back – but doesn’t move his hand. “Is that your behind? Is that my hand? That's what I like about this place - you learn something new every day.” Maddie steps back, “Will you get serious?!” – “Maddie, I just had my hand on your behind,” David reminds her. “If I get any more serious, they’re gonna move us to cable!”
Moonlighting is art subtextually doubling life – and breaking the majority of commonly laid rules. It’s a vehicle for unravelling a crazy love surrounding murder mysteries of loves much crazier: a woman hiring the pair to dig up information on her husband’s dead first wife (“She’s dead. That doesn’t mean he isn’t in love with her anymore,” she insists);36 another scouting for a range of ways to kill herself because her man is off to prison, going on a suicidal spree à la Almodóvar.37
It's circular – returning constantly in theme and subplot to the startpoint of this long-drawn-out race. It is repetitive, it is too much – yet reveling in its excess is the true pleasure behind watching Moonlighting. Including its disliked and endlessly debatable fourth season.
Shepherd was off on maternity leave. Willis’s schedule wouldn’t permit him to shoot the first episodes earlier, and distraction came soon in the form of a lead role in Die Hard: the action blockbuster to shoo in action blockbusters. This confluence of fortunes split Maddie and David up not long after their “Big Bang”, as it was called – resulting in eight episodes without the two of them together.
Viewers complained. Phone calls amounted to harassment. Moonlighting felt irreparable and yet that season delves into the most ambitious tangents in the series’ history; examining a male-female relationship through a distinctly stream of consciousness-glazed lens.
Transcending trading barbs, David and Maddie seep more deeply into a Shakespearean existence… shooting off dramatic monologues and finding painful ways to make each other jealous. Had they been coming to Blue Moon each morning and exchanging snide remarks it would’ve been too humdrum: wherefore sexual tension when the pair has done the deed?
Instead they worked alone – in real life and onscreen, where David’s anguish sent him slamming his prized car into a parking garage wall. Creator Glenn Gordon Caron has often espoused that “The show was very much about the business of being a man, and the business of being a woman,”38 but few tv shows explore love’s vicissitudes like Moonlighting. Theatricalizations of our banes are laid bare in this season as the duo makes one horrid choice after another. It’s nonsensical. It’s stepped outside reality. It's more inside David and Maddie’s minds than we had hoped to be.
It also makes for Willis’ greatest dramatic monologue of all time39 as he battles rage and rancor borne of crippling love: a fight that culminates in verbal fencing against Maddie’s condescending father, played by Robert Webber.
Upping metatextual doses, the fourth season comes close to suggesting that the whole of Moonlighting is one great metaphor. Were Maddie and David ever real? Don’t we already know they’re Bruce and Cybill’s other halves? If episodes can open up Shakespearean and film noir fantasies – who is to say these characters existed… even in their own world?
Thus a tv series assumes the linearity and logic of James Joyce’s epic tome Ulysses. In a DVD commentary for 4.1, “A Trip to the Moon,” Willis bemoans a line in Caron’s script he feels his character would not have said.
Yet the entirety of Moonlighting is overblown manifestations of our sentiments transgressing real life’s frames. In 3.13 Maddie is shocked to find that David’s living room is void of furniture. In 4.14 David lies in pain after being whacked by an assailant with a plant. When Maddie begs him to go catch the thugs, he counters: “Let ‘em go!”
“Let ‘em go-oo?!” Maddie protests.
“Who says we gotta catch ‘em?” David shouts. “Let ‘em get caught on some other detective show. Let Magnum catch ‘em. Or Jake and that big fat chubby guy. Or how about that old dame, the one that won all the Emmys [Angela Lansbury] – let her get a collar once in a while. How many times have we done this? Thirty, forty, fifty times already – and always the same thing. I say this time, this one time, we bow out…. I refuse to let you do this chase scene with me!”
David and Maddie are unreachable extensions of the self: the way readers envisage novels’ characters one evening… only to switch them with new faces the next day. They’re the sole tv characters we know stem from Glenn Gordon Caron – and from Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis – and events in their lives that became the show’s hurdles. Ironically, the couple’s enforced split extends the tease; intensifying viewers’ urgency to reunite them more with every episode.
Another kind of heartache taunted members of its cast and crew, however – and by the final season its ingenious creator had been ousted. Consequently Moonlighting was stripped of all its rhythm; its arresting twistiness.
A blackout has nixed sparks between the once-effulgent Bruce and Cybill and their (semi-)artificial selves. With the exception of “The In ‘N Outlaws” – an Agnes-centric episode sublimely animated by Allyce Beasley and Curtis Armstrong – Season 5 is a bland series suddenly deprived of soul. It’s similar to witnessing philologists take stabs at resurrecting an extinct Alaskan language.
Real life nevertheless remains irrelevant: art-making reveals more. More about the soul than conversations could expose; more substance on creators than a memoir can disclose. Somehow within its four-year, two-month run the series strung together different universes. Amidst its opposites of players runs one throughline to this day: a common treasuring of this irreplicable marvel.40 For a moment hidden similarities took flame in the same context that coerces spectators sat in a theatre to identify shared facets. Wayfarers thrown together and ships passing in the night; moonlighting strangers who just met on the way.
Thus Moonlighting provided us an education on the history of theatre and of cinema and television and their clashing players. Its melee lends us the temptation to declare the genre an outdated categorization. Pinpointing is the pinnacle of scourges in this new millennium – one style sits on this bookshelf not to be confused with other covers that adhere to that kind of design; a tv series – even in the 21st century – must fall under a “comedy” or “drama” heading to be nominated at the Emmys. Moonlighting’s not a comedy. Or drama. It’s not romance, and makes for a derisible detective series.
It is the imagination. Magnified.
2.16, “Sleep Talkin’ Guy”.
This figure is variously cited as “eleven hundred” or “three thousand”, but in a 2021 interview with Moonlighting: The Podcast hosts Grave Chivell and Shawna Saari, Caron said he had heard of “three thousand” from casting director Reuben Cannon.
1.1, “Pilot”.
Gary Rutkowski’s Interview with Glenn Gordon Caron for the Archive of American Television, Los Angeles, 19 September 2007. Segment: “Glenn Gordon Caron on how he cast Bruce Willis on Moonlighting.” Accessed here.
S. Ryan, Moonlighting: An Oral History, Fayetteville Mafia Press, Columbus OH, 2021: pp. 43-6
Rutkowski, 2007: Segment: “Glenn Gordon Caron on how he cast Bruce Willis on Moonlighting.”
2.15, “Witness for the Execution”.
1.2, “Gunfight at the So-So Corral”.
S. Samuel, “Actress Cybill Shepherd Reconnects with God through Starring Film Role in ‘Do You Believe?’”, The Christian Post, 14 October 2014. Accessed here.
Ryan, pp. 27-8.
Bruce Willis in Not Just a Day Job: The Story of Moonlighting, Part 1 (Special Features on the DVD of Moonlighting: Seasons 1 & 2).
Rutkowski, 2007: Segment: “Glenn Gordon Caron discusses creating and casting ‘Moonlighting’.”
ibid. Segment: “Glenn Gordon Caron discusses the tone of ‘Moonlighting’.”
Cybill Shepherd’s audio commentary for 2.14, “Every Daughter’s Father is a Virgin,” on the DVD of Moonlighting: Seasons 1 & 2.
Cindy Klauss & Diane Hopkins, “A Conversation with Cybill Shepherd,” www.davidandmaddie.com, 19 June 2002. Accessed here.
J. Horowitz, “The Madcap behind ‘Moonlighting’”, The New York Times, 30 March 1986
Ryan, p. 74.
1.7, “Murder in the Mail” was a 22-hour shooting day undertaken two weeks before airdate. Its final cut was delivered to the network two days before airdate. Ryan, pp. 72-3
Glenn Gordon Caron’s audio commentary for 3.7, “Atomic Shakespeare,” on the DVD of Moonlighting: Season 3.
Ryan, pp. 99-100
ibid., p. 87
Glenn Gordon Caron in Not Just a Day Job: The Story of Moonlighting, Part 1 (Special Features on the DVD of Moonlighting: Seasons 1 & 2).
Writer Debra Frank in Inside the Blue Moon Detective Agency: The Story of Moonlighting, Part 2 (Special Features on the DVD of Moonlighting: Seasons 1 & 2).
Glenn Gordon Caron in Not Just a Day Job: The Story of Moonlighting, Part 1.
Ryan, p. 192. The sum is disputed by various Moonlighting crew members, but it seems to have definitely been seven figures.
Rutkowski, 2007. Segment: “Glenn Gordon Caron discusses his style of storytelling and writing process.”
1.6, “Next Stop Murder”.
1.5, “The Next Murder You Hear”.
Frank Sinatra introducing the song “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” in a recording on the compilation album, Sinatra: Best of the Best (Capitol Records, 2011).
3.12, “Sam and Dave”.
Cinematographer Gerald P. Finnerman in B. Fisher, “Tender Loving Care for Moonlighting,” American Cinematographer, July 1986. Accessed here.
3.6, “Big Man on Mulberry Street”.
The below is from 3.3, “Symphony in Knocked Flat”.
L. Belkin, “For ‘Moonlighting’ Couple, A Very Public Private Affair,” The New York Times, 31 March 1987. Accessed here.
Rutkowski, 2007. Segment: “Glenn Gordon Caron on ‘Moonlighting’s’ 16 Emmy Noms in its First Year”.
5.2, “Between a Yuk and a Hard Place.”
4.14, “And the Flesh Was Made Word.”
Glenn Gordon Caron in Not Just a Day Job: The Story of Moonlighting, Part 1 (Special Features on the DVD of Moonlighting: Seasons 1 & 2).
Click the link at your peril - it is loaded with spoilers.
Much has been written of the cast members’ relations, so this author shall refrain from commentary. What is however evident is how much all acknowledge the show’s greatness to this day. For his book Moonlighting: An Oral History (2021), Scott Ryan managed to get interviews with all cast members except for Bruce Willis, who promised to grant him one six times but cancelled each time. His subsequent diagnosis of aphasia may account for this.
It should be noted nonetheless that on the commentary of “A Trip to the Moon” (4.1) from the Season 4 DVD of Moonlighting, Willis recollects the series in tremendous detail and his passion for the work is obvious.
Interviews reflect the same can be said for his castmates.
Very excited to revisit Moonlighting! It was appointment television in our house when I was a kid!