Moonlighting (1985 - 1989)

If people are missing, if objects are lost / we’ll find them for you, at reasonable cost

Model Maddy Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) discovers that she is bankrupt after her accountant makes off with almost all her assets. One of the few investments she still owns is one she never knew about: a share in a detective agency run by man-child David Addison (Bruce Willis). Inevitably, the sophisticated house cat Maddie and the carefree stray dog David become a mismatched, smart talking, increasingly co-dependent detective partnership, until they solve the one mystery no one wanted an answer to: Will they/won’t they?

The Anselmo Case was never solved...

The very last episode of Moonlighting ends with a title card announcing:

‘Blue Moon Investigations ceased operations on May 14, 1989. The Anselmo Case was never solved... and remains a mystery to this day.’

‘The Anselmo Case’ is a running joke; throughout the five seasons of Moonlighting it is repeatedly mentioned in passing and never explained. No one watching could possibly know anything about it, or have any investment in its solution. It is a shaggy dog story, a red herring, possibly even a dead cat; it is a reverse Chekhov’s gun. It is placed on the mantlepiece at the end of the final episode to show us that nothing more can happen, except a snapping noise and the unfurling of a little flag reading: BANG.

This is entirely appropriate. If Moonlighting was anything, it was fun. Technically it was a comedy drama, but not in the contemporary sense in which the ‘comedy’ is an excuse to keep the drama low stakes, and the ‘drama’ is an excuse not to be funny. Moonlighting takes the drama seriously, but largely consigns it to the opening and closing of cases. In between, it focuses on jokes; sometimes, it even makes you laugh.

The very first episodes are a little too typical of the cultural mainstream, that mainstream being the US in 1985; the humour is broad, boorish and fratty. But quite quickly the newcomer Bruce Willis realised he was about to become an absolutely massive star, and started to relax. When he stopped trying so hard, Moonlighting’s quirky bones began to show through. This was in part thanks to Cybill Shepherd, who -- on first reading the script -- pointed out that it was basically a light-hearted detective show in the tradition of Howard Hawks, and made everyone watch His Girl Friday (1940) before shooting started.

Shepherd and Willis weren’t Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, and certainly didn’t have their chemistry;¹ but they did both have Hollywood-level charisma, and the ability to deliver smart-mouthed back chat with speed and verve. Moonlighting scripts ran long because the dialogue was delivered so quickly; even so, they often ran out of material and had to pad with little pieces to camera.

The Hollywood influence identified by Shepherd flourished, sometimes in references but sometimes in wholesale pastiches. Early in the second season there is a film noir episode shot largely in black and white, in which David and Maddie separately dream solutions to a famous Los Angeles murder from the ‘40s. This choice clearly caused some nerves about what the audience would tolerate, or even understand; the episode starts with an introduction from Orson Welles (his last ever screen appearance), who urges the audience to push through the monochrome.

They needn’t have worried. If the producers of Moonlighting had been raised on TV repeats of movies made in the ‘30s and ‘40s, so had lots of people in the audience; when it was aired for the first time in Britain in 1986, it shared BBC2 airtime with a season of classic Hollywood movies featuring feisty female leads. Moonlighting was deeply media-literate; it knew its influences, and wore them proudly on its satin sleeves. A stylised modernist ballet sequence (directed by Stanley Donen himself) is a cheerful callback to Singing in the Rain (1952) and An American in Paris (1951), with Willis in muscular Gene Kelly mode and Shepherd waggling her gams like a primetime Cyd Charisse.

This freewheeling approach to what a TV show might be only added to the sense of giddy fun. After the brown and orange funk of the ‘70s, there was neon and bright pastels; instead of New Hollywood angst and grit, there was Tinseltown fantasy and gaiety. If you closed your eyes and didn’t think about it too hard, it was morning in America, and the sun was shining.

…and remains a mystery to this day.

But the giddiness doesn’t stop there. Moonlighting is deeply oneiric, constantly following its own loopy logic into places that, like a dream, are simultaneously recognisable and absurd. (Indeed, its pastiches of Hollywood movies -- including both the film noir pastiche and the musical ballet described above -- usually happen in dream sequences.) At times it happily acknowledges the fourth wall, and occasionally breaks it with occasional pieces to camera. At other times it climbs straight through the fourth wall, strolls through the set and right out of the studio, cheerfully unconstrained by any imaginary walls, genre conventions or sense.

Just before that final card about the Anselmo Case, David and Maddie return to the Blue Moon office to discover men taking it apart; this is because the show has been cancelled, and the production crew are striking the set. They go to see a producer, who explains to that the audience have stopped watching since David and Maddie slept together. They rush off to try to get married, thinking this might provoke audience interest; but the priest refuses. Our last glimpse of them is on the altar steps, saying goodbye as clips from the show play out. It’s all delightfully knowing; not only does the show acknowledge that it’s become less popular, but it constructs a meta joke out of the kind of desperate move writers and producers make when worrying about viewing figures.

More importantly -- and I cannot stress this enough -- throughout this sequence, we are not watching Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd; we are watching their characters, David Addison and Maddie Hayes. We are watching fictional characters who know they are fictional, and who -- while remaining fictional -- are stepping out of their fictional context and interacting with the world beyond. This wasn’t the first time the show had spiralled into this particular vortex: the closing episode of Season 2 ends with a chase sequence that runs clean off the set and onto the backlot and eventually breaks down entirely, leaving the characters to make up their own ending while worrying about the episode’s run-time.

Moonlighting is full of this kind of meta-fictional mucking about. ‘Atomic Shakespeare’ features a boy settling down to watch Moonlighting, only for his mother to make him go upstairs to do his homework; which, it turns out, is reading The Taming of the Shrew. The episode then becomes a parodic version of the play delivered in a slangy iambic pentameter, and performed by Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd playing David and Maddie playing Petruchio and Katherina. At the end, the boy runs back downstairs to ask his mother if Moonlighting is still on. No, she says, but not to worry; it wasn’t a very good episode this week.

The strength of Moonlighting was that it knew exactly what it was. It was lighthearted entertainment, an entirely disposable TV show; something that might be good or might be bad, and it wouldn’t matter. TV in that moment was disposable; go out for the evening and you’d miss it.

This knowledge that it was fun and disposable meant Moonlighting could do things with the form no one else dared to. This is one of the great joys of disposable popular culture: it allows for experimentation that more self-serious (middlebrow) art shies away from -- the hallucinatory paranoia of Philip K. Dick, the psychedelic invention of a Jack Kirby comic, the musically omnivorous melange of a late Beatles album, the dizzying weirdness of no-budget movies like Carnival of Souls (1962) or Hausu (1977). The ‘golden age’ of streaming, box-set, binge-watch TV has not produced anything so gleefully inventive, or so engaged with its own medium. We have TV that is more seriously engaged in big themes, more carefully written, more visibly acted, definitely better directed;² but nothing that is as much fun.

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For a very different approach to a detective show that’s just as full of obscure pop cultural references, there’s always the Morse prequel series Endeavour:

1. Although, to be fair, who does? Apart from Rowan and I, although if anyone else compared her to Cary Grant, I’d lamp ‘em

2. Moonlighting did, though, have a writer called Roger Director, fwiw.