Whenever anybody mentions the iconic 80s TV show Moonlighting, I automatically think about the time a group of kids held me down and put tape in my hair at Bible study.
I was in the 7th grade when Moonlighting debuted as a mid-season replacement in Spring of 1985, but I didn’t notice. I was a pretty oblivious kid. Being oblivious helped a lot in middle school. I’m the rare person who has fond memories of that time, mostly because I was so totally unconcerned with what other people thought of me. I went to school with rumpled clothes and unkempt hair, and during recess I unabashedly read magazines full of Nintendo cheat codes and played D&D with my friends. I was in my own happy little world.
It will not surprise you to learn then that I had zero interest in the opposite sex. Or sex of any kind. I had friends who were girls, but never once thought about having a “girlfriend.” So, watch a detective show that was less about detecting and more about whether or not the two leads were ever going to have sex with each other? Definitely not my thing. The defining shows of that era for me were The A-Team, Knight Rider, Night Court, Sledge Hammer!, Amazing Stories, Max Headroom, and Misfits of Science. Which explains a lot, now that I think about it.
I had heard of Moonlighting, of course. By the time I was in the 8th grade, everybody had heard of Moonlighting, even if they weren’t watching it. Moonlighting was funny, and sexy, and it notoriously broke all the rules of television. It had an earworm of a theme song by Al Jarreau. And it resurrected Cybill Shepherd’s career and turned Bruce Willis into a household name. (This was still pre-Die Hard, but we’ll get to that.)
There were a lot of mystery shows on television back then, some of the private investigator kind, like Magnum, P.I., or the cop kind, like Hill Street Blues, or the cozy kind, like Murder, She Wrote, or the romantic kind, like Remington Steele. Moonlighting claimed to be a romantic detective show too, but pretty early on the writers made it clear they felt no obligation whatsoever to deliver mystery plots that made any sense. As Scott Ryan says in Moonlighting: An Oral History, the writers saw the show instead as “an old-fashioned 1940s screwball-comedy love story.”
Screwball didn’t begin to cover it. In one episode, Maddie (Shepherd) and David (Willis) slip and slide through soapsuds. In another, they conduct a car chase in a hearse. In later episodes, they ride the luggage carousel at an airport, dance with the Temptations, and read viewer mail on the air—in character, as David and Maddie. Orson Welles provides the cold open for Moonlighting’s famous black and white episode, “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” in which David and Maddie play out a murder mystery that happened decades earlier, and in “Big Man on Mulberry Street,” Willis and Shepherd do a seven-minute dance number to the Billy Joel song of the same name. In the first episode of season five, “A Womb With a View,” Bruce Willis plays Maddie and David’s unborn child, who takes a tour of his future life with an angel. And in perhaps the show’s most famous episode, “Atomic Shakespeare,” the entire cast dons Elizabethan costumes for a post-modern send-up of The Taming of the Shrew. (But again, we’ll get to that.)
The dialogue came fast and funny. TV and film characters weren’t supposed to talk over each other, and they weren’t supposed to talk a mile a minute, but the characters in Moonlighting did both. Single episode scripts were often seventy-five to eighty pages long, while the scripts on other hour-long episodes of the era averaged more like forty-five or fifty. The final episode of the first season, for example, included this rapid-fire exchange between David and a security guard:
David: We’re looking for a man with a mole on his nose.
Guard: A mole on his nose?
David: A mole on his nose.
Guard: What kind of clothes?
David: What kind of clothes do you suppose?
Guard: What kind of clothes would I suppose would be worn by a man with a mole on his nose? Who knows.
David: Did I happen to mention, did I bother to disclose, this man that we’re seeking with a mole on his nose—I'm not sure of his clothes, or anything else. Except he's Chinese, a big clue by itself.
Guard: I'm sorry to say, I'm sad to report, that I haven’t seen anyone at all of that sort. Not a man who’s Chinese, with a mole on his nose, with some kind of clothes that you can’t suppose. So—get away from this door, and get out of this place, or I'll have to hurt you, put my foot in your face.
The dialogue was self-referential…
Agnes DiPesto (answering the phone): Blue Moon Detective Agency. Some lowdown nogoodnik made off with your dough? / We can’t solve your case because we don't have a show. / We went off the air at the end of last season... / Management wouldn’t listen to reason. / Blue Moon’s here, though there’s one thing we’re sans... / millions of loyal intelligent fans.
Self-deprecating…
Real-life TV Critic Rona Barrett (introducing a clip show, because the writers were behind again): No new episode again! And America wants to know why. So I’ve come here, to the home of the Blue Moon Detective Agency, to speak with the players themselves: Maddie Hayes, David Addison, their friends, their colleagues, their lovers. Who are these two people? What makes them tick? And what went wrong? What about the rumors? Is there friction? Or are Time Magazine, USA Today, The National Enquirer, and Star just misinformed?
And self-aware…
Maddie: Will you get serious!?
David: Maddie, I just had my hand on your behind. If I get any more serious they're gonna move us to cable!
The characters often broke the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience too:
Maddie: David, do you think he’s planning on marrying them both?
David: That would make him the biggest bigamist in bigamy history. (then, to the camera) Try saying that three times fast.
All these gags have been done many times since, by many other shows. But in the mid-1980s, this was groundbreaking television.
What it all added up to was a show that, at its peak, was attracting what TV historian Scott Ryan calls “Super Bowl-size ratings.” The Moonlighting episode “It’s a Wonderful Job” had a thirty-nine share, which in TV-speak means that thirty-nine percent of American households watched the episode live. That’s a lot. The show where David and Maddie finally hooked up? That episode had over sixty million viewers.
Cut to the fall of 1986. Moonlighting was in its third astronomical year at the top of the TV ratings, and I still wasn’t watching it. I was now a freshman in high school, and let’s just say that I was no Bruce Willis. I still wasn’t combing my hair or brushing my teeth, and I had traded my rumpled clothes for clownish ones—one outfit I actually wore to school included a banana-yellow shirt, purple pants, and a purple tie. Another consisted of bright red pants, a green shirt, and a green and blue plaid tie.
I was at least starting to think about the world outside my Nintendo and my role-playing books. And yes, that meant girls. (We’ll get to that too.) But it also meant that I had started thinking about God.
I know. Weird turn, right? But I’m going somewhere with all this. I promise.
My family has never been very religious. My parents took me and my little brother to a Methodist church for a little while when we were kids, but all I really remembered about it was that I hated having to dress up, and I hated having to sit still on a hard bench for an hour when I could have been home on the couch watching reruns of Lost in Space.
It turned out that my dad was as bored as me and my brother, and soon my family stopped going altogether. But here, now, in high school, I suddenly decided I wanted to know what this religion thing was all about, and I started going to church again. My mom was thrilled. She was the one who’d worked so hard to get us all dressed and out the door every Sunday, and so she gladly went back with me. But going to church on Sunday wasn’t enough for me. No. I was actively reading the Bible, and thinking Big Thoughts, and I wanted someone my age to talk about it all with.
So I joined my church’s teen Bible study class.
Imagine, if you will, a dozen high school students whose parents have forced them to disappear once a week into the basement of their church to sit around a big table with a youth pastor and talk about the Bible, instead of going to the mall with their friends. It already qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment under federal law. And then, into this living nightmare, comes a gawky, geeky fourteen-year-old boy, who wears purple pants, and apparently does not own a hair brush. And even worse, he has been reading the Bible on his own, and he wants to talk about it.
To say I was unpopular from the minute I walked in the door would be an understatement. I didn’t know just how unpopular though, until the day our youth pastor was a no-show for class. At first, everybody sat around anxiously, hoping beyond hope that our teacher wouldn’t show up. Everybody except me, of course, because I was the only person in the class who wanted to be there. I had some serious questions about Adam and Eve and the “Fall of Man” that I was very eager to discuss.
Five minutes went by. Then ten. When it became clear that we were on our own, the other kids got up and started goofing around. With nothing better to do, and nowhere to go until their parents picked them up, they raided the cabinets that lined the sides of the room. There they found the kind of random craft supplies that are stored in every church basement everywhere, and soon they had constructed a makeshift ball out of crumpled construction paper and scotch tape, and were batting it around the room with an empty cardboard tube.
I did not take part in this foolishness. I wasn’t there to knock pictures of Jesus off the wall, or clatter into the bookshelves full of weird books that no one wanted to read. I was there to talk about important stuff, like grace, and free will, and the meaning of life. I didn’t tell the other kids to sit down and behave, but I’m sure my discomfort was written all over my face. And soon enough, someone noticed. Because someone always notices.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened. Partially because it was a blur, and partially because I spent a lot of nights after that trying not to remember how it happened. But somehow, I ended up face-down on the carpet, kicking and screaming, as half of the kids my Bible studies class sat on me, and the other half put tape in my hair.
Because there is no God—no Methodist one, at least—our youth pastor never showed up to save me. When I had at last been completely and utterly humiliated, the other kids ran outside to mess around until their parents came to pick them up. I stayed behind, hiding under the table and crying softly to myself as I pulled clumps of tape and hair from my head.
I couldn’t show my face in that Bible study group again, let alone in that church, and I never went back. To be honest, my brief experiment with organized religion had already been nearing its end—the Bible, I determined after a lot of close reading, was full of crap—and my mortification that day sealed the deal. I put my Bible back on the shelf in my bedroom to collect dust again, fired up my Nintendo, and returned to my search for the meaning of life—aka the Triforce of Wisdom—in The Legend of Zelda.
None of the kids from my Bible study class went to my school, so I stood a pretty good chance, or so I hoped, of never having to see or hear from any of them ever again. Which is why I was stunned to get a call at home one night from one of them—a girl named Samantha. And I was even more surprised when she asked me if I had seen the Moonlighting episode called “Atomic Shakespeare.”
(I told you we’d get there!)
“Atomic Shakespeare” is perhaps the most high-concept of all the high-concept Moonlighting episodes. The episode begins with a woman, seen from only the neck down, turning off Moonlighting in the middle of the Al Jarreau theme song and telling her young son (also seen only from the neck down) that he has to stop watching TV and go study for his Shakespeare test the next day. Off he goes, grumbling, to his room, where he opens up a book to reveal the title card for this week’s episode, from an idea, we’re told, “by William ‘Budd’ Shakespeare.”
What follows is an extraordinarily clever and incredibly entertaining Moonlighting/Taming of the Shrew mashup. And why not? Both are about a tempestuous will-they-or-won’t-they courtship, and little else. We get the earnest Curtis Armstrong (one of the few cast members with any real Shakespearean experience) playing Herbert Viola playing Lucentio, and the wonderful Allyce Beasley playing Agnes DiPesto playing Bianca, while Cybill Shepherd plays Maddie Hayes playing Katherina, and Bruce Willis plays David Addison playing Petruchio. And all without any explanation or justification whatsoever, except that it’s tons of fun.
All the old Moonlighting tropes are new again in their old setting. After Herbert/Lucentio drops a bunch of backstory, a stranger in the crowd tells him, “You’ve mistaken me, sir, for someone who careth.” Which in turn makes Curtis Armstrong turn to the camera and say, “Is it my fault I get stuck with all the exposition?”
Willis rides into town on a white horse with a BMW logo painted on its rump—a joking reference to the white BMW he and Maddie drive all over town in modern-day episodes—and both Willis and the horse are wearing sunglasses. Always given the funniest lines in the show, Willis drops faux Shakespearean zingers like, “Zounds! What mounds!” when his path is crossed by a buxom maiden, and the dowry wish list Willis presents Katherina’s father includes “my own Winnebago, a chance to direct,” and “a piece of the syndication rights.”
The self-aware gags come fast and furious too. “A major plot point cometh,” Willis tells the viewer in the first act, and in the second, he parts ways with Lucentio with, “Go then my friend—until we meet again in the fourth act.” And always willing to poke fun at themselves, the writers have Willis redeliver one of his most famous nonsense lines from way back in the show’s third episode—“Do bears bear? Do bees bee?”—but this time with a Shakespearean bend. “Do bears beareth? Do bees beeth?” Willis asks, to which Curtis replies with confusion, “Sayeth what?”
In some of the banter between David/Petruchio and Maddie/Katherina, it’s hard to tell where the Shakespeare ends and the Moonlighting begins. The show’s producer, Glenn Gordon Caron, loves to joke about how the network tried to cut some of the bawdier lines from “Atomic Shakespeare”—only to learn that Ron Osborn and Jeff Reno, the Moonlighting scribes who wrote the episode, lifted those directly from The Taming of the Shrew. Even funnier, the network let them leave all those jokes in. They were, after all, “literature.”
All’s well that ends well in the episode. David/Petruchio leads a church full of 14th century Italian wedding guests in a rendition of The Rascals’ “Good Lovin’,” the writers pull in some fortuitous and profound references to the sun and the moon from The Taming of the Shrew, and in a twist on the play’s ending, David/Petruchio and Maddie/Katherina both learn that it takes humility and compromise to have true love. “We wanted to make ours about equals,” said writer Ron Osborn. “That was a very conscious choice. As funny and great as that play is—and it’s one of my favorites—in the end, Shakespeare is not very woke.”
How much the episode finally cost—$2 million? $3 million? $4 million?—no one is quite sure. Between all the extras and the fancy costumes and the legion of hair and makeup professionals they had to hire and the new sets they had to build and the fact that the entire episode was written, shot, and edited in eighteen days, with the writers often turning in pages the day they were filmed, “Atomic Shakespeare” became the most expensive episode of television ever made up until that moment. It wasn’t something the network was happy about, but they did love those thirty-nine share ratings.
Okay. Back to Samantha, on the phone, asking me if I’d seen “Atomic Shakespeare.” “Why?” I asked, a question that covered a number of questions I had about this call. Why was she looking for someone who had seen this episode? Why was it so important? And why on Earth had she called me? No girl had ever called me on the phone before. Did she secretly like me, and this was her way of initiating small talk? To quote the Bard, true hope is swift and flies with swallow’s wings, and my hope was soaring.
“Because,” said Samantha, “I have to write an essay for school about it and it’s due tomorrow, and I remembered you were good at writing.”
Even now, across the decades, I feel the crushing blow of those words. Samantha was not calling because she was interested in me, or wanted to be my friend, or even get to know me. She knew all she needed to know about me already. 1) I was a writer. 2) I was of course home for her to call on a weeknight. And 3) I was a patsy.
Had I seen the episode? I have now, of course, but I hadn’t then. I maybe remembered turning past Moonlighting and seeing Bruce Willis on a white horse with a BMW logo on its butt, but then I had most assuredly switched over to Crime Story on NBC. Had I ever read The Taming of the Shrew, the play the episode was based on? No, I had not. The closest I’d come was watching the film adaptation of Kiss Me Kate a half dozen times.
Was I going to admit any of that, and have the only girl who’d ever called me on the phone stop talking to me and hang up?
No, I was not.
So I sat for the next hour on the stairs in my house, the extra-long kitchen phone cord wrapped around the corner, missing first Cheers, and then Night Court. All to teach a girl who had once, very recently, either put tape in my hair or held me down so someone else could put tape in my hair, how to write a compare and contrast essay about a Moonlighting episode I hadn’t watched and a Shakespeare play I had never read.
In retrospect, I think it only appropriate that Moonlighting played a small part in my self-debasement. Because after all, wasn’t that why David Addison was always playing the fool in the show? To get the girl? And it worked, for him. Just a few episodes later, after two and a half seasons of faux hookups in dream sequences, and teasing near-misses in real life, Maddie and David finally made the beast with two backs.
Casual observers will tell you that Maddie and David sleeping together was the beginning of the end of Moonlighting. So fast and so far did it fall, that two seasons later, this show that had been the 9th-most watched show on television at its peak had dropped all the way to 49th. So infamous was the show’s demise, in fact, that it gave the name to a trope. Even today, bringing your will-they-or-won’t-they characters together and breaking the sexual tension of a show is called “The Moonlighting Curse.” But is that what really killed Moonlighting?
No. The writing was already on the wall before David and Maddie went groping for trout in a peculiar stream. By the middle of the third season, Cybill Shepherd was pregnant with twins—so pregnant they had to film her bed scene with Willis standing up—and she would go on to miss the entire first half of season four. Bruce Willis, meanwhile, had starred in a little movie called Die Hard, and yippee-kay-ay, he was suddenly a giant movie star who was far less interested in doing a weekly TV series. The series’ creator, show-runner, and main writer, Glenn Gordon Caron, who was the driving force behind the show’s distinctive voice, was fired by the network in the middle of season four after butting heads with Cybill Shepherd, and the final death blow came when the Writers Guild of America went on strike in 1988.
Moonlighting never recovered, and was cancelled in 1989. After that, it practically disappeared. Never managing to put together more than eighteen episodes in a single season, Moonlighting didn’t have enough episodes to go into syndication. Worse, the show had bought only the first-run and rerun rights to the many pop songs they used, which meant they couldn’t make the show available on home video without renegotiating the contracts. With rare exceptions, Moonlighting was practically impossible to watch until it was finally released on DVD in the mid-2000s, twenty years after it had gone off the air. Streaming presented a whole new raft of music licensing issues, and it wasn’t until 2023 that the series finally became available to watch online. You can catch it on Hulu now, but for who knows how long.
As for Samantha, she must have found someone else to help her write her English papers, because she never called me again. I guess, as Al Jarreau sang, we were moonlighting strangers, who just met on the way.
I LOVED Moonlighting and thought about it for years. I was so excited to see it show up on Hulu! I always have liked Bruce Willis's comedy better than his action stuff (I know, I know--keep it to myself).
When I think of Moonlighting, it's The Taming of the Shrew episode I remember first. It was fun to walk back through the series in your words.