“Moonlighting” is back.
ABC’s groundbreaking romantic comedy series starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis arrives Oct. 10 on Hulu in its streaming debut, 34 years after its final fadeout.
“We tried to get the show on Disney+ when it was first announced and when the Hulu situation developed we explored that,” series creator Glenn Gordon Caron told The Post. “A couple of yr ago my agent reached out to Hulu and that basically got the ball rolling. It’s taken years for us to get the resources together and it was a giant effort and I’m extraordinarily grateful.”
“Moonlighting,” wherein Shepherd and Willis played quirky private detectives Madolyn “Maddie” Hayes (a former fashion model) and David Addison Jr., premiered in March 1985 as a midseason substitute — but, as viewers soon discovered, it was anything but a “burnoff” series.
Inspired by the screwball comedy movies of Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, “Moonlighting” shattered primetime conventions with its noir-ish texture, breaking of the “fourth wall” (characters speaking on to the viewers … very meta), lengthy soliloquies and rapid-fire dialogue (amongst many other taboo-busting elements).
The chemistry between Shepherd and Willis was obvious from the get-go and it paid off handsomely: “Moonlighting” rocketed a previously unknown Willis into stardom (pre-“Die Hard”) and confirmed Shepherd’s star power in her first-ever regular series role after a string of hit movies within the Nineteen Seventies (“The Last Picture Show,” “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Taxi Driver”).
Allyce Beasley played rhyming receptionist Agnes DiPesto and Curtis Armstrong played her love interest, Herbert Viola.
When it signed off in May 1989 after 67 episodes (all available on Hulu), “Moonlighting” had amassed 41 Emmy nominations (including Shepherd and Beasley) and a 1987 statuette for Willis.
Caron, Shepherd and Beasley spoke to The Post individually concerning the impact of “Moonlighting,” Willis, and their memories of working on the series.
(In March 2022, Willis, 68, was diagnosed with aphasia and retired from acting. In February, his family revealed that his condition progressed and he’s been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.)
Caron: I brought Bruce in 11 times and he was the just one I brought in [for the role]. The issue with Bruce is that he didn’t appear to be an ABC leading man to [network execs], but I wasn’t all for doing a show with an ABC leading man. Thank goodness there was a girl there named Ann Daniel, one among the only a few women [network] executives on the time — the remaining of the room were men. And Ann, in her own way, type of set them straight. She said, “I don’t know if Bruce Willis is a number one man or an ABC leading man but he sure looks like fun to me.” It froze the room and so they reconsidered and we were in a position to get Bruce the part, which meant the world to him and to me.
Shepherd: I met Bruce in an office with Glenn and my temperature went up a minimum of 10 degrees and I believed, “This guy is the one.” I at all times knew to not act on it; we got here close, Bruce and I, because we were each very interested in one another, but we managed to simply stop and never to meet that, and it had an enormous amount to do with the success of the show. We fought for Bruce to be within the show; he needed to do a screen test and so they wanted me to be in it and I said no — what in the event that they resolve they don’t want me? Bruce was funny, sensible, sarcastic and real and we couldn’t have chosen a greater co-star.
Caron: ABC was so convinced that Bruce made no sense next to Cybill that, after they finally gave it the OK, they said, “You should utilize him, but don’t let the 2 of them get romantically involved. Nobody will ever imagine it.” So I said, “OK,” and, in fact, within the pilot they get romantically involved. I used to take Bruce to ABC and we’d walk down the hall and the feminine assistants would just swoon. However the people making the [casting] selections were 30- and 40-year-old men in order that they didn’t have the identical perspective.
Beasley: The very first thing that involves my mind when desirous about Bruce was a really subliminal connection from the pilot. The major scene we had together was once we thought they were going to shut [the detective agency] and there’s a very sad scene toward the top of the day where I’m saying goodbye to him and I just keep in mind that feeling in that scene and the sensation I got from him — there was just an actual connection.
Caron: There have been two things about Bruce. One was that he jogged my memory of the people I grew up with; Bruce and I are virtually the identical age. I grew up on Long Island and he in Delaware. He gave the look of an actual guy and there have been not a number of real guys on television then — everyone was very polite and well-groomed. The opposite thing he did, and I don’t think he gets enough credit for this, was that he was amazing with language. I used to be writing all this dialogue — soliloquies pages and pages long — and he’d take a look at one and in 20 minutes had all of it memorized. He understood meter and understood every part was musical. He’d call me from the soundstage and say [in a Bruce Willis voice], “Glenn, you higher come down here, they’re messing along with your stuff.” They might get off meter, didn’t understand meter and didn’t respect meter.
Beasley: Right from the get-go Bruce took off and was so huge. I remember my manager and I were going to a screening of the pilot together and he said, “Wow, I can’t wait to see this. I hear that Bruce Willis is the following big thing.” The thrill was already on the market.
Shepherd: We broke all of the partitions. There wasn’t a wall that we left unbroken. It was just a rare combination of the correct casting and a superb creator. A whole lot of times people don’t want to present the creator credit anymore — you may consider Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel — but on this case it was Glenn. He was not afraid to interrupt the principles any way he could to make the show great in order that’s a part of his genius which you could’t deny.
Caron: The massive thing we took from Howard Hawks was speed. For those who watch the shows by way of how quickly the dialogue is delivered, how quickly the stories move … for some people it was incomprehensible but for individuals who cared about it, it made perfect sense. We got that from Hawks, from “His Girl Friday,” attempting to see how quick we could rev it up. We got a lot credit for breaking the fourth wall and I used to be baffled by that. Once I was a child I watched George Burns and Gracie Allen and so they broke the fourth wall on a regular basis, as did Abbott and Costello and the Hope/Crosby “Road” movies, so the concept of breaking the fourth wall wasn’t all that radical to me — but clearly it was radical to broadcast television at that moment.
Beasley: Throughout the pilot Bruce and I were walking across the twentieth Century lot. I knew he had just come out from Latest York and I had been in California a few year-and-a-half. I said to him, “Can I make it easier to? Do you would like a spot to go? Are there people you’re staying with?” I had no idea where he was coming from in any respect. I used to be attempting to be Upper West Side-friendly with him and he was very nice and funny about it. I knew the places where he used to bartend [in New York City] — they were my hangouts, too. We knew of the identical haunts back within the day. He even studied with any person who was my mentor and a father figure to me, a very good teacher and theater guy named Wynn Handman. He’d been in Wynn’s class for a few month before he got here out to California.
Caron: Bruce and I understood one another. We had a number of the identical references — silly references, but they were ours: The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, The Bowery Boys, Laurel & Hardy. I loved Frank Capra and Bruce said to me someday, “Have you ever ever heard of Preston Sturges?” He turned me on to him. Cybill, in fact, was an amazing cinephile because she lived for a very long time with [filmmaker/film historian] Peter Bogdanovich. So the three of us — we had our differences — but aesthetically we admired the identical things and wanted to achieve for a similar things.
Beasley: Once I got here back to work on “Moonlighting” (1987) after … two weeks maternity leave … I remember Bruce coming to my trailer, unannounced, because he couldn’t imagine that I used to be actually back at work so quickly and desired to see it together with his own eyes. [Beasley was married at the time to actor Vincent Schiavelli.] He was really complimentary and amazed about what a cute baby [son] Andréa was and said something like, “Geez, with you two as parents, that is such a good-looking kid!” He meant it and I didn’t take offense. Bruce was at all times … Bruce.
Shepherd: Individuals are going to laugh [when they see “Moonlighting”] and so they’re going to get the dramatic parts between everybody within the show after which the good chemistry between Bruce and I. The sensible writing of Glenn Gordon Caron with the comedy and the drama and every part all pulled together. ABC didn’t imagine on this show enough to allow us to attempt to get away with it — and we did.
All five seasons of “Moonlighting” at the moment are available on Hulu.
