Believe it or not, Moonlighting has never been on any streaming service, despite the presence of Bruce Willis in his breakout role, and the legendary chemistry he had with co-star Cybill Shepherd. Hulu is debuting all five seasons of the show, remastered in HD (not 16×9, but at least in HD) from the original film masters. Does it hold up over 35 years later?
Opening Shot: An unusual watch sits on a nightstand. An alarm beeps. A man gets up, kisses his wife, puts on jogging gear, then puts on two watches: the unusual one and a modern digital watch.
The Gist: As the man jogs through a park, he’s followed by a man with a mohawk (Dennis Stewart). The mohawked man chases the jogger into the street, gun drawn; the jogger gets hit by a car, and the mohawked man takes the unusual watch from the jogger’s wrist and runs off.
Madeline Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) wakes up in her bedroom, surrounded by pictures of her from her modeling career. Her chef is breaking things in response to a second bounced paycheck in a row, which Maddie didn’t know about until her house manager, Selma (Liz Sheridan), tells her. When Maddie goes to her accountant’s office, it’s empty. Her attorney (James Karen) tells her that her business managers have stolen all her liquid assets; his advice is to go to all the money-losing businesses that she owned as tax write-offs and tell them they’re being liquidated.
One of the businesses is City Of Angels Detective Agency, run by David Addison (Bruce Willis). When Maddie comes in he’s busy throwing a Nerf ball into a garbage can, which promptly falls on the head of receptionist Agnes Di Pesto (Allyce Beasley) when she brings Maddie into his office. David is slick, and jokes around, and he also recognizes Maddie for the commercials she used to do for Blue Moon Shampoo.
When she tells him that the business is closing, he follows her out the door, and when he can’t convince her to keep the agency alive, he says, “From all the TV commercials and the posters and stuff, you’d never guess what a cold bitch you are,” which gets him a slap across the face.
Meanwhile, the man with the watch is supposed to rendezvous with an older gentleman named Heinz (Robert Ellenstein), but he’s intercepted by another man named Simon (Dennis Lipscomb), who chases him to an upscale hotel.
It also happens to be the hotel where Maddie is going on a dinner date with a very self-satisfied plastic surgeon (Jim MacKrell). David, who found out where she was when he called her house, interrupts their dinner to convince her once again to keep the agency open, and that he’s the best detective in Los Angeles. She just wants him to stop talking and get out of her life. But that starts to become impossible when the elevator opens, the mohawked man spits the watch out and puts it on her wrist, then collapses with a knife in his back.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Moonlighting took the will-they-won’t-they vibes from creator Glen Gordon Caron’s previous series, Remington Steele, and amped up both the comedy and sexual tension in a way that seemed revolutionary back in 1985.
Our Take: When Moonlighting debuted in March, 1985, I was 13 going on 14; I’m not sure I watched the 2-hour pilot on its first run but certainly caught the show sometime during its first season. And it was a revolution for me, as well as network TV audiences in general. Unless you were a fan of the noir classics like The Thin Man, the overlapping, snappy banter between Willis and Shepherd was something that we had never seen on TV to that point.
And it was pretty undeniable from the first episode on that the show’s stars had some amazing chemistry, whether they actually liked each other off camera or not (most reports say they didn’t). It’s also undeniable that the show made the previously little-known Willis a megastar and ushered Shepherd into a new phase of her career.
The pilot certainly showed audiences what they were in for with Maddie and Dave. It’s interesting to look back at it and see how many long-standing elements of the series were established during the pilot, not the least of which was the moody saxophone soundtrack that riffed off the dreamy theme song, a hit for the late Al Jarreau. The episode certainly had the cinematic look and pacing that Caron fostered throughout his time on the show, as evidenced by shots like Maddie’s feet as they came out of the elevator and marched down the hallways (a staple of the series) and the elevator chase between the mohawked man and the menacing Simon.
Even the signature dialogue was there, from the overlapping style to Willis’ patter where he said things like, “Do birds fly? Do ducks duck?” Of course, that would morph into “Do bears bear? Do bees be?” at some point, but you get the idea. Other snappy refrains, like “Fine!” “Fine!” “Good!” “Good!”, were to come, but this was a good start.
However the pilot, whose “mystery” wasn’t all that mysterious and mainly served to show us Dave and Maddie bonding over hanging off the Eastern Columbia Building clock tower in downtown L.A., only hinted at what was to come. We’re talking about things like the dialogue that broke the fourth wall to self-referential jokes about Willis’ receding hairline, to the whole thing being a TV show, to dream sequences shot in black-and-white, to even jokes about the tension between Willis and Shepherd and how Caron was always falling behind in getting ABC new episodes to air. Even the soft focus used in Shepherd’s closeups didn’t appear until later in that first season.
This is why I also wanted to watch one of my favorite episodes of the series, “Big Man On Mulberry Street.” It was a Season 3 episode from 1986, at the height of the Dave-and-Maddy will-they-won’t-they frenzy that made the show a top-ten hit. Dave and Maddie are having one of their usual arguments about how he’s being undependable and how she has high standards, when Dave finds out that a friend of his back in New York has died. But the shocking part is that Maddie finds out that he’s the brother of David’s ex-wife. Shocked at the revelation, Maddie becomes obsessed with the notion of the seeming eternal bachelor David having been married, and she dreams of the two of them dancing to Billy Joel’s then-current song “Big Man On Mulberry Street” in a Stanley Donen-directed dream sequence.
Aside from Shepherd’s big hair and copious shoulder pads, the episode holds up because both stars’ performances are top notch, especially during monologues both ace because they know their characters so well. But the audacity Caron had to derail an episode for a seven-minute dance number was what I remembered most from when I first saw the episode, knowing that it wasn’t even the first time he did something that daring. It was frustrating from the perspective of a burgeoning teenage TV critic like myself, who just wanted the Dave-Maddie story to go forward, but it was also something admirable, because I really hadn’t seen something like that on a show before.
Yes, the show started flaming out after the third season, coinciding with Dave and Maddie finally hooking up in the next-to-last episode of that season. But that was just as much about Willis making Die Hard and Shepherd having twins, leading to not a lot of screen time where the two of them were together, than the idea that Caron and his writers couldn’t write for Dave and Maddie once the sexual tension broke. Once we started getting episodes concentrating on Agnes and her office boyfriend, Bert Viola (Curtis Armstrong), pretty much everyone knew the show was doomed.
But, boy, was it a fantastic ride for those first three seasons, and the pilot does a good job of establishing what that ride was going to be.
Sex and Skin: No actual sex, but a lot of innuendo, much of which would have gotten Dave fired if he uttered it in 2023.
Parting Shot: After their adventure, Dave goes to Maddie’s house to convince her one more time to become partners at the now-renamed Blue Moon Detective Agency. She says she’ll think about it another day, and she opens the door to her house to see a throng of reporters; Dave tells them all to come back tomorrow.
Sleeper Star: Allyce Beasley did a lot of the comedic heavy lifting as Agnes, especially with the fun rhymes she did when she answered the phone.
Most Pilot-y Line: The Eastern Columbia clock tower sequence is even more unbelievable in retrospect, from how either of them survived climbing to the clock to the ladder managing not to tip over in one scene or break off in another.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We were happy to see that Moonlighting‘s pilot held up, even after 38 years, mainly due to all of the elements that made the show so revolutionary back in the mid-’80s, as well as the incendiary chemistry between Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.