10 episodes that highlight Moonlighting’s eclectic, boundary-busting brilliance

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Glenn Gordon Caron’s metafictional Moonlighting didn’t just break the fourth wall; it flipped the camera around and showed viewers the stage hands and boom mics behind the wall. Musing on its own existence as if it were the René Descartes of the Reagan era, Moonlighting winks at the audience, letting us know it’s in on the joke, jabbing itself in the side as it knowingly adheres to television’s trappings with irreverence (and irrelevance). Starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd as a pair of really bad detectives who solve more cases than they have any right to, Moonlighting riffs on the “amateur sleuth” and “bickering couple” tropes of Hart To Hart and Remington Steele, on which Caron was a writer. The insolent, often insulated show bends boundaries into bow ties with its solipsistic tendencies (the characters discussing their own artifice) and insolence toward network TV standards (the creative ways the characters conveyed vulgarities, such as “I don’t give a flying fig,” “Holy shiiiii...p wreck,” and “That’s a crock of what this coffee tastes like”).

The show got off to a shaky start but corrected itself with impressive alacrity. The two-slot pilot originally aired as an ABC Sunday Night Movie, and it feels like an ABC Sunday Night Movie. It’s one of the strangest pilots in network TV history insofar as it’s an utterly banal episode that only vaguely resembles the brilliant, format-gerrymandering show that followed. It introduces Maddie Hayes (Shepherd), a wealthy former model whose sleazy accountant pilfers her funds and leaves her broke, and David Addison (Willis), a motor-mouthed trickster whose predilection for pop-culture references comes pouring out in fire-hose fulminations. The episode lurches along, with little of the show’s singular wit, as Maddie and David become entangled in a middling jewel-theft caper. The episode culminates in a clock tower set piece that hints at the movie-derived hijinks that would follow. The Harold Lloyd influence may have been lost on casual viewers; for them, Caron threw in a Star Trek reference.

In subsequent episodes, the show establishes the dynamic between Maddie and David, an unlikely pair of polar-opposites who only ever agree that they disagree—and they can’t even do that, most of the time. The characters don’t sound so complex or deep on paper: Maddie is beautiful and decent, her icy exterior belying her romantic heart; David is crude and crass and has, as Maddie puts it, “The morals of a rabbit, the character of a slug, and the brain of a platypus.” But in execution, they’re two of the most colorful characters network television has ever produced. They don’t have particularly good chemistry (Willis and Shepherd fought vehemently on and off set) as much as they each fuel the other’s mania. Maddie spends more time slamming doors and yelling at David than she does detecting, while David throws office parties, sets up dating hotlines, and expounds on his profound life observations (Do bees be? Do flies fly?). He’s frequently chauvinistic, his salacious, juvenile mind able to turn anything into an innuendo or come-on, yet he’s inexplicably lovable. Chalk that up to Willis’ ability to go from tactless to tactful on a dime, and then pocket the dime.

The show begged, borrowed, and stole from Hollywood, from the diffused way Shepherd was filmed to look like a flaxen-haired Hollywood vixen (using two-shots to keep Willis appearing more modern) to Alf Clausen’s flair for turning Bernard Herrmann and Paul Donaggio themes on their head and spinning them like a sidewalk breakdancer. But whereas Remington Steele (which Caron wrote for in its first season) openly cites the movies that inspired each episode (“Have you ever seen The Third Man, Laura?”), Moonlighting embeds its allusions, suturing the sleuth stories with the ideas and aesthetics of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, Billy Wilder, or Fritz Lang. The overlapping dialogue feels akin to the pleated wordplay of Howard Hawks, and Gerald Finnerman’s photography imbues the show with a classic mood. Orson Welles even introduced an episode, which aired just five days after his death, and was his last appearance on camera.

Admittedly, American TV watchers weren’t necessarily glued to their screens each week to anatomize and study Caron’s body of cultural references: The will-they/won’t-they romantic tension between Willis and Shepherd galvanized viewers besotted by the Sam-and-Diane dynamic. Shelley Long didn’t leave Cheers until 1987, so that show’s first season without Diane aired during Moonlighting’s third, in which the romance is teased so hard it suffers from friction burn. David and Maddie finally consummate their romance at the end of the season. The next two seasons featured less and less of David and Maddie, as the stars became increasingly busy off screen (Willis doing Die Hard, Shepherd having kids), and the viewership dwindled.

At least one person benefited greatly from the show. Bruce Willis was a Hollywood nobody in 1985. Thirty years old, a former security guard and private investigator with a few stage credits on his resume, and a distinctive Jersey accent that compensated for a childhood stutter, Willis wasn’t leading man material. By 1986, he was a heartthrob whose face prettified 19 million television screens. Two years later, Willis was a certifiable A-list action star, and he abandoned television shortly thereafter to pursue a career of big budgets and killing bad guys. But in that brief interim between obscurity and ubiquity, Willis had what remains one of his best roles, using his motor-mouthed delivery, somehow articulate and rhythmic even as it goes on like a verbal deluge, to create a character who’s as funny as he is frustrating. Oh, and that laugh—that high-pitched chortle that cuts through even the noisiest scene—is something that’s sorely lacking from most of his grumpy-bald-man Hollywood roles.

The show’s on-set discord is now the stuff of legend for TV buffs, interrupting production and seeping into the fabric of the show’s overarching narrative. The actors bickered and Caron couldn’t keep to a schedule; while he furiously tried to write the day’s dialogue, he had the crew film arbitrary shots of Maddie’s feet leaving the elevator just to buy an extra couple of hours to write as they set up and dismantled cameras and lights. And not everyone appreciated his lofty artistic ambitions. As Caron puts it:

These 10 episodes explain why Moonlighting couldn’t be a regular show. It had to be a brilliant show.