This Moonlighting essay contains spoilers. Glenn Gordon Caron’s ABC series (1985-89) on Hulu features Cybill Shepherd, Bruce Willis and Allyce Beasley. Check out TV reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the VV home page.

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Rewatching every episode of Moonlighting taught me something — that the common wisdom about the legendary 1980s series is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Also: it’s wrong.  

Moonlighting didn’t go downhill because its stars, Cybill Shepherd (as Blue Moon Detective Agency owner Maddie Hayes) and Bruce Willis (as Maddie’s wiseass partner David Addison), didn’t get along. It didn’t go downhill because Willis became a movie star and Shepherd became pregnant with twins and there were scheduling conflicts. Moonlighting didn’t go downhill because creator Glenn Gordon Caron and the writers decided to torpedo the unresolved sexual tension and let David and Maddie “boink” (as David used to describe it). It didn’t go downhill because Caron left the series at the end of season four, or because of the writers’ strike that followed, or for any other reason. 

No, dear readers: Moonlighting didn’t go downhill at all. It was airborne from the start, and it never touched down. Moonlighting played by its own rules, breaking the fourth wall whenever it could, calling attention to the process of its own creation, reinventing itself anew each week, thwarting or destroying the audience’s need for traditional catharsis, overcoming challenges and obstacles and (yes) unforced errors and own-goals that would’ve destroyed any other show.

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Moonlighting can’t be ranked or measured any more than snowflakes can. It’s as much of a fiction about itself and the act of its own creation as Six Characters in Search of an Author (1976), Seinfeld (1989-98) or Endgame (2011), and as much of a lab for formal experimentation as Miami Vice (1984-89), Twin Peaks (1990-91), The Sopranos (1999-2007), Community (2009-15) and other series that seemed to dare themselves to surprise the audience every week, even if it meant irritating or alienating them. There are no bad episodes of Moonlighting — only great, good and interesting.

[Cut to David Addison staring at you]: “He’s actually gonna defend this, folks. Go get yer popcorn.” 

A CURSED MIRACLE

From the start, Moonlighting was a cursed miracle of a show. Its lead actors loathed each other. Caron’s working method was half-Maddie, half-David, combining toothbrush-on-the-tile perfectionism and “what the hell, let’s try it” playfulness — a recipe for chaos, C-suite agita and budget overruns. Caron, like some other writer-producers with an improvisational impulse, was notorious for rewriting scenes the night or morning before shooting, sometimes during shooting. Most hour-long scripts run between 48 and 59 pages; Moonlighting usually ran 120 because the characters rattled off the lines at a screwball-comedy pace, which meant there was twice as much material to be memorized. 

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Caron’s cinematographer was Gerald Perry Finnerman, an Old Hollywood pro who gave the original Star Trek (1966-69) its dynamic camera movements and lush colors. You can tell Finnerman and the crew spent more time framing and lighting shots than the norm for 1980s TV. Every image strives to be as exciting or glamorous as possible, whether it’s a shot of a car pulling up in front of a hotel’s valet station or a closeup of Shepherd with a glam filter on the lens creating a slight halo effect. There were epic slapstick foot chases, often involving vehicles as well and movie-quality stunts (the Moonlighting pilot ends with three characters clinging to the clock-tower face of the Eastern Columbia building in downtown L.A.). 

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Moonlighting was the most expensive drama on the air at the time. Two of the best-known episodes, the Mel Brooks-style “Taming of the Shrew” parody “Atomic Shakespeare” and the black-and-white “old movie” flashback episode “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” ranked among the most expensive episodes of anything made up to that point.  When ABC told Caron he had to shoot “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice” in color, so they could run it that way in syndication and on home video, Caron used black-and-white 35mm film, forcing them to colorize it after-the-fact if they were so keen on the idea (they weren’t). Orson Welles, in his final screen appearance, introduced the episode, assuring viewers there was nothing wrong with their sets. 

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There were other budget-busters along the way, including a sendup of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) in which Maddie imagines David’s life if he’d never met her (he’s so depressed that he wants to kill himself, despite being married to model Cheryl Tiegs), and an episode in which Maddie discovers that David was married once, to an unfaithful woman, and fantasizes the couple’s sordid decline as a dance number set to Billy Joel’s song “Big Man on Mulberry Street” with choreography by Stanley Donen (Singin’ in the Rain, 1952) and actress-dancer Sandahl Bergman (1979’s All That Jazz, 1982’s Conan the Barbarian) guest-starring as the former Mrs. Addison. Moonlighting knew full well how many days and how much money it had for each episode, yet took as much time and spent as much cash as it felt was necessary, letting angry network calls go to the production office answering machine — how much do you wanna bet that it had one of Agnes DiPesto’s rhyming greetings on it? Even otherwise “normal” episodes contained extravagant, random-seeming detours or surprises, often because the script page-to-screen time ratios were imprecise and the show had to figure out ways to fill the remaining airtime. Season three’s “Symphony in Knocked Flat” starts with a two minute “prologue” with David and Maddie and The Temptations performing “Psychedelic Shack.” 

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After reports of behind-the-scenes chaos and the stars’ mutual loathing escaped the blind item sections of gossip columns and became public knowledge, Moonlighting’s producers and ABC’s marketing and advertising departments leaned into it, treating it as a shared joke between the show and its fans. One network promo showed executives silently waiting on delivery of a new episode (it never arrived). Another promo found Beasley and Armstrong claiming to be Shepherd and Willis. Beasley’s “Maddie” was just Beasley wearing a blonde wig and one of Maddie’s dresses; Herbert’s “David” had sunglasses and a hipster hat. The episode where Maddie and David finally got horizontal aired after a long period without a new episode, and started with a parody of a 1940s MovieTone newsreel (“While citizens around the world settled into easy chairs hoping to watch a new episode of Moonlighting, news broke of one star’s pregnancy, and another’s unfortunate accident on the icy slopes of Iceland,” the announcer intoned, over a shot of man on skis igniting a rocket strapped to his back). Season five kicks off with a musical number starring David, Agnes and Herbert, promising, among other things, that new episodes would appear regularly. (They didn’t — but to be fair, the writers’ strike had more to do with that than anything on the production end. Maddie showed up in the last 10 seconds of the number, apologizing for being late.)  

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Did any of this stuff quell audience frustrations with the irregular production? Not really. But it was as audacious and fun as Moonlighting itself. And now that we know the show’s whole story and its absurdly fraught creation, the anecdotes are just one more part of the legend, like stories of how long it took Francis Ford Coppola to shoot and edit Apocalypse Now (1979), or Fleetwood Mac to record Tusk (1979), none of which affect the audience’s ability to appreciate the finished product. 

A CABLE SHOW ON A NETWORK 

By its midpoint, Moonlighting became a documentary of its systematic un-making, transforming its own largely self-inflicted creative conundrums into the primary driving force of the show. But it stayed playful and inventive to the end, and rather than hedge its bets by becoming more stylistically conservative, Moonlighting seemed to paint itself into narrative corners mainly for the thrill of having to escape them. The aforementioned boinking episode, for instance, occurred at the midpoint in a series of episodes that saw David driven mad with jealousy of Maddie’s new suitor, the sensitive astronaut Sam (Mark Harmon, who at that point was nearly as a big a sex symbol as Willis, thanks to his role as a womanizing, self-destructive plastic surgeon on CBS’ St. Elsewhere [1982-88]). Season four sent Maddie to Chicago and kept her and David separated despite her being pregnant with what was believed to be David’s baby; there was also a secret wedding to another man, Walter Bishop (actor-filmmaker Dennis Dugan, who would have a big career in the 90s and aughts as Adam Sandler’s go-to comedy director). 

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In a lot of ways, Moonlighting now seems like a 1990s premium cable show that happened to run on a traditional broadcast network. It carried itself as if it was smarter and wilder and more interesting than anything else on television. Even after repeatedly shooting itself in the foot, Moonlighting walked with a swagger, like David doing his horny-rooster strut through the Blue Moon offices on the way to tell Maddie his latest allegedly brilliant idea. 

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By the end, Moonlighting was ouroboros-ing itself every week. In a fifth season episode, Maddie and David walk past a video store while a clerk removes a Die Hard (1988) poster from the front window. That season was supposed to open with a 3D episode sponsored by Coca-Cola, but when it fell through, David and Maddie apologized to the audience for not delivering it. The finale finds an ABC executive in a screening room telling Maddie and David that the show has been canceled for low ratings because “even a case of poison ivy is more fun to watch than you two lately.” The executive is played by the aforementioned Dugan; neither David nor Maddie recognize him as the latter character’s husband, and he’s watching scenes from an episode that had aired two weeks earlier. A closing title informs viewers that the Blue Moon Detective Agency ceased operations on May 14, 1989 and that the case of the week remained unsolved.

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Incredibly, though, even when Moonlighting was so pleased with itself that you wanted to smack it like Maddie slapping the smug off David, it was never wrong about its own specialness. The episodes where Agnes and/or Herbert step into the spotlight because it was logistically impossible to build an episode around Shepherd and Willis felt like consolation prizes for the inconsolable at the time. But with a few decades’ remove, plus the audience being trained to make peace with auteurist-style “give them what we want, not what they want” storytelling, the non-David-and-Maddie episodes play like charming and even heroic attempts to stretch, with their own tone, pace and logic. (“Atomic Shakespeare” was a dry run for Herbert and Agnes’ spotlight episodes; while David-as-Petruchio labors to “tame” Maddie-as-Kate, Herbert-as-Lucencio becomes smitten with Agnes-as-Bianca and tries to win her heart.) The episodes where David and Maddie are separated right after consummation have a similarly deliberate feeling, even though they were responses to extra-dramatic factors. It’s like part of a challenge that the Moonlighting writers and filmmakers devised for themselves. How far can we bend an already flexible format until it breaks? And when it finally falls apart, will there be anyone left watching the show?

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Other great series that followed Moonlighting had stretches with an unstable or inscrutable vibe, including the sections of The X-Files (1993-2018) where Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are separated (also due to behind-the-scenes issues) and the episodes of Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones (2011-19) and other series that stubbornly refused to focus on the characters that most viewers wanted to see in order to explore a minor character, indulge a bit of inspiration or just goof around. If Moonlighting has a deep kinship with any canonically great series that followed, it’s the long-delayed third season of Twin Peaks, which gives established characters scant attention, yet finds the time to build long sequences around people you’ve never met, re-create the detonation of the first atomic bomb and show an unnamed janitor silently sweeping the floor of the roadhouse while “Green Onions” plays from start to finish (two minutes, 52 seconds). No matter what happens, the audience is expected to roll with it. 

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In the end, David and Maddie often feel less like protagonists than erstwhile hosts who sometimes allow themselves to be subsumed within the fiction but other times float above it, flirting and quipping, smoldering and pining. Maybe they’re less characters in search of an author than cartoon characters tormented on a drawing board, being continually erased and redrawn, clowning and suffering, erupting into dimensionality and soul, then becoming doodles again.

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Moonlighting never went downhill because it never set foot on earth. Its head was in the clouds from frame one. Moonlighting was a 67-episode, live-action embellishment of the final gag in the classic Warner Bros. cartoon short High Diving Hare (1949): Yosemite Sam ties up Bugs Bunny, puts him at the end of a diving board and saws it off, only to have the platform and ladder collapse under him, leaving the plank suspended in midair. Then Bugs turns to the viewer and says, “I know this defies the law of gravity — but you see, I never studied law!”

Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) is a staff writer for New York Magazine and Vulture, the editor-at-large of RogerEbert.com and the author or co-author of a dozen bestselling books on film and television, including The Wes Anderson Collection, Mad Men Carousel and The Sopranos Sessions.

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