'Moonlighting' and The Memory Hole
Standards were way, wayyyy lower back in the 1980s, kids.
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Recently, Hulu started streaming Moonlighting, the show mainly famous for a) making Bruce Willis into a star and b) being almost totally unavailable in the modern age. I used to think streaming meant I'd be able to watch anything I wanted, any time I wanted like those lucky ducks in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest1, but now TV shows and movies are literally vanishing from streaming platforms and being memory-holed by their own production companies, and my brother, who is a die-hard physical media weirdo, laughs at me smugly as he fondles all the movies he literally owns that no one can take away from him2.
And yet, in this atmosphere of memory-holing, Moonlighting has appeared after being more or less a legend amongst the Olds since it went off the air (ignominiously) in 1989. There was a perfunctory DVD release in the early 2000s, but it was bastardized due to music rights that made certain sequences of the show impossible, and so the show hasn't been available on any streaming platform, which these days means it's essentially not available (the DVDs are out of print, and I don't even own a DVD player any more)3.
I was a high school-aged lad when the show's pilot premiered in March, 1985, and yet somehow a TV show starring a 1970s movie star I'd never seen in a single film (Cybill Shepherd4) and a dude no one had ever heard of (Bruce Willis) in a story about a retired fashion model working as a detective in a pale His Girl Friday style captured my teenage attention56. I was a big fan of Moonlighting when it was on the air, but I haven't though about it much since. As it hits streaming there are some thinky pieces out there talking about how revolutionary and innovative it was, and this is true. But as I tour some of the old episodes out of curiosity I am compelled to also remind everyone that as inventive and revolutionary as Moonlighting was, it also sucked, because it was 1985 and in the 1980s we just had much lower standards than we do today7.
Do Bears Bear?
In 1985, Moonlighting was the 23rd most popular show on television8. The Top Ten wasn't exactly scintillating: The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Murder, She Wrote, 60 Minutes, Cheers, Dallas, Dynasty, The Golden Girls, Miami Vice, and Who's the Boss? I'm not saying that these shows didn't have entertainment value (or that I didn't watch some of them), but any TV lineup that includes both Dallas and Dynasty is obviously a TV lineup starved for any kind of innovation and revolution, no matter how thin. I mean, The A-Team was still on the air. The Love Boat was still on the air. Fantasy Island had just been canceled the year before. TV in the 1980s was awful9.
But it's all we had. Many of these shows were competently made, and could be very good—but there weren't a lot of creative chances being taken. Cheers was a reliable joke machine, but it wasn't going to uncork a musical number or air an episode that was a pastiche of Bergman films or something like that.
So Moonlighting had two advantages immediately: The chemistry between Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, which was legitimately terrific10, and the vague gesture at a kind of fast-paced, comedic dialogue that hadn't been seen in a while. Once the show began experimenting a bit more with form, introducing lavish dream sequences, musical numbers, and strange, surreal extended jokes that broke the fourth wall (an episode in Season Three ends before the story is resolved because the production staff want to go home, so they barge in, take all the props, and break down the set, leaving the actors (still in character) to hug it out and wish each other a good summer).
Some of that stuff is legitimately terrific, even 40 years later! The show had moments of real brilliance (or at least real fun). Looking back, it's easy to see why it impressed folks (like me). We didn't have much to choose from, and even though video rentals existed back then it wasn't the same as being able to just dial up whatever you want to watch11. Moonlighting blew minds, but it did so more or less by default because there wasn't much competition in the weird-avant garde-surprising category of television.
By default because Moonlighting was, in many other ways, a pretty mediocre show.
I Don't Care What You Do, Just Do It Faster
Watching the Moonlighting pilot (which originally aired as a 2-hour movie and backdoor pilot) today is excruciating. The pacing is janky12, the story is not great, and while there are some effectively cinematic shots and thoughtfully composed scenes, it feels slow and extremely padded. Like, extremely padded. The only thing that saves it is Shepherd and Willis' interactions, which feel like a completely separate show and which are delightful.
Much of the rest of the show's run wasn't too far off from that sad beginning, unfortunately. For every unexpected moment when the show gave us an entire episode in iambic pentameter, there were five episodes with relatively tired mysteries and a lot of vamping. Willis and Shepherd often lean into the overlapping bickering act, but it's often without purpose: Just two people talking very fast over each other. There aren't a lot of jokes or plot movement in those exchanges. It's just volume, and a way to burn off a few minutes of screen time13.
For example, in the aforementioned episode that ended with the staff breaking down the set, the last minute and forty-five seconds is Willis and Shepherd slowllllllllly saying goodbye and getting into their cars. Sure, they're riffing humorously on the whole "will they/won't they" thing that people liked so much, but watch this fucking sequence: It is painful. It is awkward. There are no jokes, no meaningful exchanges. It is literally a show stretching out a scene to fill time, and this is not an isolated incident14.
Context matters. You watch Moonlighting today and you might think people are insane calling this show a classic that changed television. When you realize it was up against Growing Pains, it starts to make a little more sense.
Also, re-watching these episodes made me realize that I still use the phrase "I'm sorry to say, I'm sad to report, that I haven't seen anyone/thing at all of that sort" in daily conversation15 and I'm not sure what that says about me except that as a teen I siphoned all of my father's liquor from the kitchen cabinet and it shows.
NEXT WEEK: Lupin and boring uber-competence.
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Of course, I also imagined I’d be immune to The Entertainment, which is laughably not true, as I become addicted to just about everything on contact.
I used to own a lot of DVDs, but then one day I realized I hadn’t actually watched one in years. I’m that jackass who will never pop The Godfather into a DVD player, but if I stumble on it on a Saturday afternoon, 10 minutes in and interrupted by commercials, I’ll watch the whole thing. I know how crazy that is.
Someone recently sent me a large digital file in the mail on a DVD-R—no, really, this actually happened in 2023. I stared at it in bemused shock for a moment, then had to contact them and tell them I had absolutely no way to access it, do you not Dropbox?
To be fair, I was 14 and Cybill Shepherd looked like Cybill Shepherd, so that might have had something to do with it.
I was … not cool.
Is “I WAS … NOT COOL” the title of my memoir? Sigh … yes.
About everything. People like to riff on 1980s pop culture, but trust me: Everything was worse.
I could cite a source for this, but where’s the fun in that?
That being said, a few years earlier as a pre-teen I’d been wholly immersed in Dallas and the Who Shot JR? mania, to the point where I made my parents call me JD and often wore a cowboy hat around the house. How I didn’t end up in therapy is a mystery.
Although I’m kind of shocked at how often Willis (in character) just manhandles Shepherd, grabbing her by the arm and pushing her around, and she just accepts it as if this is just how gender roles worked back in 1985.
The Youngs don’t understand the terror of arriving at Blockbuster on a Saturday night only to find empty shelves and a single copy of some straight-to-VHS thriller starring John Saxon.
The pacing issue is true for me for most films and TV shows produced before the 1990s. They seem glacial, with weird, long pauses and strange directorial decisions that linger on meaningless shots. I suspect when I was watching this stuff as a kid I was busy doing 4 other things while watching, and thus didn’t notice.
It’s entirely possible that a version of Moonlighting that was a half hour sitcom with just 22 minutes of actual content would have been brilliant.
To be fair, they often lampshaded this, like the Season 4 episode that ended 10 minutes early and then gifted us with this legendary moment.
No, it usually doesn’t connect to anything in the conversation and yes, people think I’m weird for just blurting it out, but I firmly believe that the key to making a joke funny is to repeat it over and over again for years until someone finally breaks. I just need a few more years with this one.
I hated Moonlighting. It’s my third most hated super popular entertainment (#1,2 being The Sound of Music and ET). I had to be dragged to Die Hard because it had that fucking guy from Moonlighting. I liked Die Hard, but it took until Pulp Fiction for me to forgive Bruce Willis for Moonlighting. Now I feel bad about it because he’s coming to a sad end.
I loved this show, and love your deep dive. TV in the 1980s was a mixed bag. There were some great character-driven action adventure shows that I miss, the Stephen J. Cannell type. But Moonlighting was in its own category. It blew up too fast and cost too much to last. And that's probably best. Shows that go for 10 seasons jump the shark long before their end.