This past July marked 35 years since a barefoot Bruce Willis yippi-ki-yayed his way into a career as one of the most iconic action stars of the late 20th century. But before Die Hard, Willis was best known as a wisecracking, romantic leading man. It might sound strange to those of us who grew up seeing him grimy, grim, and armed to the teeth on movie posters, but that John McClane smirk was honed on one of the all-time great will-they-won’t-they TV romances, which is finally streaming legally for the first time ever.
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Moonlighting was a smash hit series in the 1980s, starring Willis and ’70s bombshell Cybill Shepherd as David Addison and Maddie Hayes, private investigators in Los Angeles. Maddie, a model most famous for being the (fictional) “Blue Moon shampoo girl”, has all her money stolen by a dodgy accountant and begins to liquidate assets only held as former tax writeoffs — including the failing City of Angels Detective Agency, where the lackadaisical Addison is the detective in question. He convinces her to stick around with a combination of mild sexual harassment, motormouthed charm, and genuine intrigue, and before you know it, they’re partners in the newly renamed Blue Moon Investigations.
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It’s a tried and true formula. She’s an uptight former model fallen on hard times! He’s a wise-cracking slacker with a heart of gold! They solve crimes! But like its peers in the all-time TV couples with UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension) top tier, the formula coupled with lighting-in-a-bottle onscreen chemistry is a timeless recipe for success. I know this because as a TV-obsessed (and TV romance-obsessed) teen, I went from knowing nothing about it to racing home from school every day to catch afternoon reruns of this show that was the same age as me.
Moonlighting is a masterclass in screwball, opposites-attract TV couples
There are so many parallels between this show and present-day favourites. Maddie and David’s bickering, screwball, opposites-attract chemistry recalls, among hosts of other TV couples, Jess and Nick’s on New Girl (and Julius Pepperwood is absolutely the kind of alias David would think up for himself on the spot); the just-kiss-already couple/case of the week combo is giving everything from The X-Files and Bones to Get Smart; the sheer volume of words in any given Addison riposte would make Amy Sherman-Palladino tap out from exhaustion.
And perhaps most significantly, the show’s gradual (and eventually literal) dismantling of the fourth wall, pop culture references, and playful genre experiments — not to mention its rocky, idiosyncratic, beef-riddled behind-the-scenes woes — forged the path Community would cover in paintballs and running gags decades later.
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Those genre excursions included, not exhaustively, a tongue-in-cheek “do not adjust your set” introduction from Orson Welles (in his last ever screen appearance) for one of the show’s standout episodes, “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice”, which was aired partially in noirish black and white; a Claymation fantasy sequence (paging Abed Nadir!); and an episode that’s just the cast doing The Taming of The Shrew, with a mix of original dialogue, groanworthy Mel Brooks-style gags and self-referential asides, a musical interlude where Willis as David as Petrucchio performs The Rascals’ “Good Lovin” as his own wedding, and a Princess Bride-esque framing device.
Moonlighting is more than its genre experiments
It’s not all about the gimmicks, though. The two leads are at the top of their game, with Shepherd in particular putting on a clinic in being the straight-man foil to a million-mile-an-hour megastar. (Willis won both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for the role.) It’s an absolute goldmine of peak ’80s style; there should be half a dozen Instagram accounts dedicated to Maddie’s lush, incredibly flammable ‘fits and the chrometastic period interiors.
And while the screwball dialogue and flirting gets all the attention, at its best Moonlighting is also just exquisitely made TV. The opening sequence of the Season 1 murder-mystery episode “The Next Murder You Hear”, for example, featuring Gregg Henry as a lonely-hearts radio show host, is a stunning, understated peek into the lives of ordinary Angelenos in the small hours of the night, utterly compelling even before a single shot is fired. (The theme song, by the great Al Jarreau, is also a banger: a breezy, sax-tastic cocktail with the cloying yet refreshing quality of a West Coast Cooler.)
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It’s worth noting that Moonlighting is also notorious for (spoiler alert) going downhill fast creatively almost immediately after the leads resolve all that sexual tension. But this is something of a TV urban legend — it just so happened that right after that resolution, Shepherd had twins (there’s only so long you can have a character carry a succession of ever-bigger boxes around in every scene), and Willis took advantage of that to go and make… Die Hard. As NPR’s Linda Holmes explains, a number of factors (yes, including creative missteps, and the departure of the show’s creator Glenn Gordon Caron) combined to make for a fourth and fifth season that lacked the sauce and sizzle of those first three. (“Where are David and Maddie?” asks one character during this period; “They’re not in this episode,” comes the reply.)
Power through the necessary table-setting in the double pilot episode, calibrate your cheese filter for Maximum 1980s, and you’ll be rewarded with your new-old favourite show.
Let’s be clear: the sizzle and the silliness are very, very fun. But they’re not all the show has going for it. It’s a comedy, a drama, a mystery, a romance; it’s a comforting background watch, and an endlessly fascinating experiment; it’s a runaway commercial success (It was once a tentpole of ABC’s blockbuster Tuesday night block, alongside iconic series like Who’s The Boss and, uh, Matlock) and also still a hidden gem.
Power through the necessary table-setting in the double pilot episode, calibrate your cheese filter for Maximum 1980s, and you’ll be rewarded with your new-old favourite show.
How to watch: Moonlighting is now streaming on Hulu.
