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Maddie Hayes & David Addison (Moonlighting)

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Glenn Caron Gordon

Maddie: Wipe that stupid grin off your face.
David: This is the smartest grin I know.

Moonlighting is the TV show many of us now officially claim to hate, but once upon a time, it sure was a lotta fun. This is the television series that brought screwball romantic comedy and high-speed banter back into fashion and made Bruce Willis a star. If only we’d known what a monster we were creating…

It could even be argued that it helped usher in the era of prestige television, in its smart, hip, rule-breaking, booty-shaking attack on every television convention they–or more precisely creator and head writer Glenn Caron Gordon–could find.

In the sassy, spunky pilot, Cybill Shepherd played MADDIE HAYES, a fabulously successful (natch!) model (she was the Blue Moon Shampoo Girl) forced to liquidate after her business manager skips town with most of her assets. The City of Angels Investigations, originally purchased as a tax dodge, and run by DAVID ADDISON (Willis) is one of her doomed businesses, but an unexpected mystery throws owner and employee together, and a classic love-hate relationship blooms. Addison convinces Maddie to keep the agency going, and she re-christens it The Blue Moon Detective Agency.

That may have also been the last episode where the mystery actually had much of anything to do with the plot. The “mystery” angle forever after was really just an excuse to throw Maddie and David at each other, and let the sparks fly where they may. And to the show’s credit, the sparks did indeed fly.

Maddie was prim and proper, a good girl with very pre-set notions on almost everything, a no-nonsense prima donna intent on remaking the world in her image, wound up so tight she could almost squeak. But where Maddie was tightly-wound, David was just, frequently, hilariously tight. And unshaven and unwashed. A fast-talkin’ scam artist, a laidback lout, a rock’n’roll party boy with all the morals of an alleycat, one of the highlights of the early shows was the episode where Maddie comes into her office one morning only to find David inexplicably hanging from the back of her door, still drunk from the night before, warbling Aretha Frankin tunes.

The show was a huge hit, and at least at first deservedly so — a clever, updated spin on Hammett’s Nick and Nora screwball charm, slyly switching all the Prohibition-era talk about booze into AIDS-era double-entendre-laden ripostes on sex, and then spritzing it all with the obvious lust the two had for each other. The critics loved it. The public loved it. I loved it.

There were spin-off record deals and hype up the wazoo, Shepherd was rescued from premature obscurity, and unknown Bruce Willis became a star. It was witty and inventive, cheeky and audacious, and even the frustratingly erratic scheduling of this allegedly weekly show couldn’t scare viewers away from something that so regularly challenged the very rules of television itself. The fourth wall was frequently broken, and the writers let loose with a cavalcade of loony ideas, including musical episodes, and “very special episode” takeoffs on everything from The Honeymooners to Pygmallion (“My Fair David”) and The Taming of the Shrew (“Atomic Shakespeare,” performed–almost–entirely in iambic pentameter). There were off-the-wall, cameo-stoked fantasy sequences. One of my favourites was the second season’s “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice” black-and-white episode, an attention-to-detail film noir take-off that was even introduced by Orson Welles. For the writers of Moonlighting, the world was their oyster, and everything was fair game–they made pop culture pop.

Unfortunately, the cast, the producers and the writers also read the reviews, and started to believe their own press. They ended up loving themselves. What had started as a often-hilarious spin on everything, became increasingly a self-referential ode to itself, a masturbatory orgy of self-love. Originality became just another gimmick, to be played solely for its own sake, while egos spun helplessly, hopelessly out of control, and the show’s on-screen bickering bleeding into real life and tabloid headlines. By the time the show, after just 66 episodes, finally crashed landed under the weight of all those egos and pretensions, Shepherd and Willis were showbiz names to reckon with, and everyone else was left with a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.

Including, apparently, the show itself. The dismal last season’s final episode ends with an extended breaking of the fourth wall, and David and Maddie confronting a TV producer, bemoaning the fact they were being cancelled.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love you two guys,” he tells them. “But can you really blame the audience? A case of poison ivy is more fun that watching you two lately. People fell in love with the two of you falling in love, but you couldn’t keep falling forever. Sooner or later you had to land someplace.”

Where they landed was on their own swords. It was a rare example of a show going out on such a brutally self-critical note, and yet it was also a reminder of the show’s take-no-prisoners charm.

Still, the show had–and has–an army of dedicated fans. There was a 2002 campaign to get the series released on DVD (they finally started releasing them in May 2005) and even a reunion campaign that, thirty or so years after the show was cancelled, was still sputtering along..

And some people think I have no life….

Since the show, Willis and Shepherd have gone on to occasionally play other private eyes — but fortunately not together. Shepherd actually appeared in Stormy Weathers, a pilot about Los Angeles private eye Sam Weathers, and Willis has played various hard-boiled, wise-cracking cops and other law enforcement offices in countless action flicks, including the mega-successful Die Hard franchise, the Shane Black-scripted The Last Boy Scout, where he played private eye Joe Hallenbeck, a pumped-up, nastier version of his David Addison character; Last Man Standing, yet another uncredited rip-off of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest; and Once Upon a Time in Venice wherein Willis pisses away whatever charm he once possessed to play Venice Beach private eye Steve Ford.

UNDER OATH

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FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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