Moonlighting, Season One (1985)

Today, Moonlighting is probably best known as the TV series that launched Bruce Willis's career, but in its day was a very popular and successful show that, for a time, captured the zeitgeist of America in the mid-1980s.

Nominally starring Cybill Shepherd, who was by far the bigger name of the two leads before the show began, the script gives her co-star Willis every possible opportunity to steal the scene which, with his undoubted charisma on top, he makes look effortless. (That said, his character is a sexist dickhead who these days would have been swiftly cancelled if he tried even a fraction of what he got away with back then.) It is easy to see why Willis, then still possessed of some hair, became a movie star only a few years later.

The premise of the series is that Maddie Hayes (Shepherd) and David Addison (Willis) run a private detective agency together. Neither has any real detective skills worth speaking of, in this first season at least, and consequently they solve most of their cases through dumb luck, helped a little by Hayes possessing the glamour of a former model, and Addison's real skills being those of a fast-talking con artist.

As you might imagine from that description, this is a comedy and not a serious detective drama. In fact the genre would be more accurately described as 'screwball' comedy (like Bringing Up Baby and other films of the 1930s and '40s), and what made this series stand out from the many other US detective shows of the era is based on the successful updating of this genre to the 1980s thanks to the chemistry between the two leads. 

Sadly, the show in a lot of other respect is still a product of its time, and that time is all too obviously the 1980s. The cheesy music has not dated well (except in the sense that with it you could accurately date the show with your eyes closed), and neither has the 'comic' dialogue - some scenes are so broad that they feel like they should have a laugh track over them. Willis has the skills to sell the material (most of the time), but other actors are not so fortunate, and the only thing that separates this from an out-and-out "filmed before a live studio audience" sitcom is the glossy location shooting.

While later seasons would be known for playing more with genre tropes and repeatedly breaking the fourth wall, giving the series another way in which it was unlike (and so stood out from) its peers, there is precious little of this to be seen in the first season. This is more like a straight send up of TV detective shows, and as such is uncomfortably straddling the drama and comedy; the two sides of its nature.

At only six episodes in length (one of which was a double-length pilot), short for an American network TV show, this feels more like a trial run than a full series. It is long enough to prove the success of the Willis/Shepherd dynamic, but I cannot imagine that this on its own would have been enough to sustain a much longer run. In a case of life imitating art, the show was saved as much by luck as its characters so often were.