MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)
By:
January 19, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
MOONLIGHTING | 1985–89
What with their shoulder pads and their hair, the women of the Eighties sure took up space. Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) bursts onto the scene like a linebacker in pastels at the Blue Moon Detective Agency — a struggling business in a lackluster portfolio that her unscrupulous accountant has managed. Shepherd took her lead actor cues from Cary Grant — according to Allan Arkush, who directed a dozen episodes of the detective comedy. So David Addison (Bruce Willis) had to be equally big to measure up; he filled every episode with dirty jokes, gags, and R&B renditions.
Echoes of screwball comedies, musicals, film noir, and The Thin Man reverberate throughout the five-year fever dream of Moonlighting, which aired when there was still enough proximity to Old Hollywood for the nostalgia to make sense. “The Murder’s in the Mail” (Season 1, Episode 7) recalls Hitchcock, with Bernard Herrmann’s swirling “Prelude from Vertigo” recurring throughout… but the episode’s resolution, if you can call it that, is an all-out food fight. Orson Welles even makes a cameo, introducing a flashback episode shortly before his demise.
As a teenager, I was tuning in mostly for the laughs… and for the resolution to the will-they-won’t-they tension which was present from the pilot through the end of Season 3, Episode 14, when — spoiler — Maddie finally gives Eighties hottie Mark Harmon the heave-ho, in favor of a living-room-destroying coupling with her co-detective/nemesis. (The parallel office romance between misfits Agnes DiPesto and Herbert Viola would prove to be more buoyant than Maddie and David’s relationship.) Yet at the time I was immersing myself in Hitchcock films and others decades out of step with what my peers were watching, Moonlighting helped to normalize my otherwise isolating cultural history exploration.
I lost interest in Moonlighting as my high school social life picked up, but looking back at the show’s trajectory after the Maddie-David merger — Maddie’s pregnancy, a truly bizarre episode with Willis playing the baby in utero, clad in a diaper and then a blue onesie, ending with a miscarriage — it seems I hopped off the train just in time.
MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Michael Grasso on MAX HEADROOM | Heather Quinlan on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 | Mark Kingwell on CHINA BEACH | Judith Zissman on SANTA BARBARA | Adelina Vaca on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES | Deborah Wassertzug on MOONLIGHTING | Josh Glenn on VOLTRON | Adam McGovern on A VERY BRITISH COUP | Alex Brook Lynn on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION | Nikhil Singh on CHOCKY | Sara Ryan on REMINGTON STEELE | Vanessa Berry on THE YOUNG ONES | Dan Reines on GET A LIFE | Susannah Breslin on PEE-WEE’S PLAYHOUSE | Marc Weidenbaum on LIQUID TELEVISION | Elina Shatkin on PERFECT STRANGERS | Lynn Peril on THE SIMPSONS | David Smay on THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF MOLLY DODD | Annie Nocenti on THE SINGING DETECTIVE | Tom Nealon on MIAMI VICE | Anthony Miller on ST. ELSEWHERE | Gordon Dahlquist on BLACKADDER | Peggy Nelson on SEINFELD | Nicholas Rombes on TWIN PEAKS | Ramona Lyons on ÆON FLUX
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!