Where Can I Watch Blue Moon Tv Series
Streaming Services, Hear My Plea: Please Pick Up The Rights To 'Moonlighting'!
Photo: Everett Collection
35 years ago this month, ABC aired the two-hour pilot episode of Moonlighting, the hands-down greatest television show of the 1980s. Moonlighting was everything: comedy, mystery, romance, and TV noir. It brought back the flirty, rapid-fire dialogue and gauzed camera lenses of old Hollywood, and deployed them with a self-awareness that was absolutely new. It brought the world Bruce Willis, and therefore, indirectly, Seagram's Golden Wine Coolers. It was an unforgettable and groundbreaking television show we should all be streaming right now … EXCEPT WE CAN'T BECAUSE NOBODY IS CARRYING IT!
The pilot —which is available on YouTube, at least until this article gets published— gets us right into the action: Cybill Shepherd plays former model Maddie Hayes, who finds that she's been fleeced by her business manager. She needs to liquidate her assets, which to her surprise includes a detective agency run in a slipshod manner by Bruce Willis's David Addison. She wants to close the agency down, he wants to use her name to drum up business. They are at cross purposes, they are for sure going to have sex at some point, they find themselves right in the middle of a jewel heist in a pre-gentrified DTLA, and we are off to the races.
Moonlighting wasn't even supposed to be a detective show. Creator Glenn Gordon Caron was at the end of an unsuccessful overall deal with ABC when they asked him to try something within that genre, and though he initially balked at the idea, he got to work on a weekly mystery version of The Taming of the Shrew. Once he developed the character of Maddie, he knew he was writing for Cybill Shepherd, herself a former model with a cooled-off career and a reputation for being difficult. But when it came time to cast David, ABC saw everyone in town before Caron settled on a then-unknown Bruce Willis. "ABC vigorously didn't want him in the show," Caron told The Chicago Tribune in 2005. "They were willing to pay off myself and Bob Butler, the director of the pilot, and Cybill Shepherd, to go away." The network didn't think audiences would buy Maddie's attraction to this David, but Caron insisted: "I kept saying, 'I don't think you're right. I bring him down the hall, and all the secretaries are twitching.'"
Which, you know, gross. But he's not wrong; with David Addison, Bruce Willis arrives fully formed. A star from the first frame. Which is maybe why the show went off the rails so quickly. At first, Cybill Shepherd bristled at the dialogue-heavy scripts and long shoot days; "It's easier to do if you're still reaching for the stars," Caron admitted, "but it's a lot tougher if you're already a star, if you've already reached the top of the mountain." Willis was more game at first, but as his profile began to rise and movie scripts arrived at his trailer door, he became less willing to play. Almost from the very beginning, the show had a reputation for being a nightmare, the leads for not getting along.
It's possible that that's what made the show work. There is a palpable tension between Shepherd and Willis, and it turns out, the desire to strangle someone sometimes looks exactly like the desire to screw them. Caron didn't make the job easier on either of them, writing a Shakespeare-themed episode entirely in iambic pentameter, and, I swear, putting them in dance sequences.
Experts agree: Bruce Willis dancing to Billy Joel's "Big Man on Mulberry Street" is the second most 1987 thing that ever happened. The first, obviously, is the series of Seagram's Golden Wine Cooler commercials Willis did the immediate wake of Moonlighting's success. This has nothing to do with the show, I just want you to see them. Prepare yourself for a young Sharon Stone and a very patient dog.
Moonlighting was such a sensation, its theme song put Al Jarreau on the pop charts for the last time. It peaked at #23 in July of 1987, right in between Suzanne Vega's "Luka" and Debbie Gibson's "Only In My Dreams. Now there's a time capsule.
The very thing that made ABC bristle at hiring Willis is exactly what made him a movie star and a remarkably effective pitchman for sugary alco-bevs: He was just a tiny bit weathered, never pretty, always smirking, sexy. An entirely new kind of leading man for an entirely new kind of show, one that frequently made the previously-unseen move of breaking the fourth wall. In nearly every episode, Shepherd and Willis would turn to the camera, comment on the action, and acknowledge that they were in fact on a television show.
Of course, a lot of the show's digressions really were to fill time, or to explain why so many weeks had passed between new episodes. Tension between the leads, Shepherd's pregnancy, Caron's perfectionism with scripts, along with Willis's film career, broken clavicle, and I swear to God debut album The Return of Bruno, all slowed production down to the point that none of the show's five seasons fulfilled their 22-episode orders. Plots began to center Blue Moon Detective Agency's receptionist Anges DiPesto (Allyce Beasley) and detective Herbert Viola (Curtis Armstrong of Revenge of the Nerds and Better Off Dead). Ratings dipped, and the show only managed 66 episodes over five seasons.
The conventional wisdom at the time was that Moonlighting sputtered because it broke the tension and had Maddie and David hook up (or, as David would put it, boink) too early. And maybe that's so, but by season three, viewers had earned a prop-destroying sex scene like this one.
I must have been 15 when I watched that in my family living room with my mother. I remember her saying: "That is not the way life is. You will not be doing things like that as a grown-up," and thinking to myself "Well, not with that attitude I won't."
A whole new generation of viewers and their mothers should be bingeing Moonlighting right now, but the show is nowhere to be found among the streaming platforms. This is probably due to the many music cues the show used: the above "Be My Baby," the "Blue Moon" Shepherd performed in a dream sequence, and Addison's beloved "Limbo Rock" among them. Those songs ain't cheap, and the show simply wouldn't work without them. (Lionsgate put out a DVD box set in 2005, but even that has been long out-of-print and is going for semi-exorbitant rates on eBay.)
Moonlighting is simply timeless, Cybill Shepherd's pastel pumps and shoulder pads notwithstanding. It shone brightly and briefly, and if HBO Max can afford $2 million per friend for an unscripted Friends reunion special, surely somebody can cough up some cash to bring this show back into our lives.
Come on, streamers. Respect yourselves.
Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now.
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Source: https://decider.com/2020/03/31/moonlighting-show-is-not-streaming-or-even-available-to-buy-and-thats-a-crime/
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