After nearly two decades of will-they-won’t-they suspense, the groundbreaking television series Moonlighting is finally on streaming. Yet despite its absence, Moonlighting never fell out of the public’s consciousness. Any analysis of Die Hard’s origins worth its weight in tinsel must mention how no one thought the guy from Moonlighting could make a credible action hero. However, for anyone who came of TV-watching age in the ‘90s, seeing Moonlighting has been an exercise in futility. The show never made it to syndication, and outside a couple of cameos on cable, Moonlighting remained a fixture of the legend of Cybill Shepherd, unseen and hard to describe.
That ended today as Glenn Gordon Caron’s groundbreaking comedy hit Hulu, making the show widely available for the first time since a DVD release in 2005. But what exactly took so long? It’s a mystery worthy of Blue Moon Detective Agency.
What is Moonlighting?
Moonlighting was a romantic comedy series created by Glenn Gordon Caron. High on the success of his breakthrough series, Remington Steel, a detective series starring pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan, ABC commissioned another mystery series from Caron. He returned with something a little different.
Moonlighting stars Shepherd as Maddie Hayes, a fashion model whose accountant embezzles her into bankruptcy. Left with few options, she begins working at the Blue Moon Detective Agency, which she purchased as a tax write-off, under the tutelage of David Addison (Willis). The show is as ludicrous as that description, which is the point. Moonlighting foregrounded the will-they-won’t-they romantic relationship of Maddie and David through weekly adventures that moonlighted as formal experiments. Through themed mysteries and dream sequences, the show took genre detours, allowing its stars to tip-toe into musicals, screwball comedies, film noir, and Shakespearean drama. The show’s playfulness opened the door to self-aware jokes that broke the fourth wall, its detective series format, and viewers’ brains.
Moonlighting ran for five seasons, with its stars and audience growing tired of the schtick after its leads finally kissed in season three. Around this time, Die Hard had made Willis one of the world’s biggest stars, and Shepherd gave birth to twins, forcing her absence from much of the show’s back half. With the dramatic tension resolved, Willis disinterested in television, and Shepherd focused on family, Moonlighting abruptly ended in 1989, leaving Blue Moon’s final case unsolved.
Where has Moonlighting been?
Moonlighting ran for 66 episodes, which, unfortunately, means it fell short of the typical threshold for syndication of 100 episodes. The simple fact that there wasn’t enough Moonlighting for round-the-clock airing kept the series from entering network and cable line-ups. But, in 1999, the show landed on Bravo—before Bravo became the center of the Andy Cohen Unscripted Cinematic Universe—under the distinguished banner of “Too good for TV” programming. It would be its only serious American revival until Lionsgate released the series on DVD between 2005 and 2007. All five seasons have since gone out of print but can be found on eBay. Though those releases were woefully incomplete and missed scenes and music.
As for streaming, well, like most television, Moonlighting was produced before Netflix was a gleam in Reed Hastgins’ eye. Produced without the words “streaming” in licensing agreements, the show became a nightmare for lawyers in the mid-2000s due to the show’s use of popular music and, more or less, remained untouched by Walt Disney Company, its owners for 20 years. This is a similar fate that kept The State, The Wonder Years, and WKRP In Cincinnati away from home video for decades.
“When we made Moonlighting, television shows didn’t typically use pop music,” Glenn Gordon Caron told EW last year. “It was really just us and Miami Vice at that time. So when deals were made for the music, no one anticipated streaming. In order to exhibit the show [on streaming], the owner of the shows, which is the Walt Disney Company, has to go back and make deals for all that music — and they’ve resisted doing that for six or seven years now.”
Per Indiewire, the streaming version of Moonlighting is the most complete release since its initial airing. Elements from the series missing from the DVD release, including several cold opens and the use of the “William Tell Overture,” have been restored. TVLine reports that some background and ambient music has been swapped out while anything deemed “critical” to the story remains.
All of that’s in the past, though. Moonlighting is finally available to anyone with a Hulu account, bringing this quirky, unique, and historically significant show back to television where it belongs. Some will-they-won’t-theys weren’t meant to last; sometimes, that’s a good thing.