Moonlighting

[drewshi]

Moonlighting didn't suffer from the quirky humor. That's a staple of its creator, Glen Gordon Caron. It suffered from the stormy relationship between Shepard and Willis off screen and it died when they consummated the relationship on screen. Fans were willing to go through all the zaniness from the special episodes to to the fourth wall breaking to Maddie getting married to Mark Harmon coming in as a love interest.

You mentioned that Moonlighting came on the heels of Remington Steele. Caron wrote many of the episodes of Steele's first season and you can see how he was influenced when he created Moonlighting. This quirkiness would carry over in his other series, Now and Again and Medium (and it's not easy to be quirky when you're dealing with a psychic who helps the police catch serial killers).

[tombitd]

Dec 27, 2010 13:15:00 GMT -5 drewshi said:

Moonlighting didn't suffer from the quirky humor. That's a staple of its creator, Glen Gordon Caron. It suffered from the stormy relationship between Shepard and Willis off screen and it died when they consummated the relationship on screen. Fans were willing to go through all the zaniness from the special episodes to to the fourth wall breaking to Maddie getting married to Mark Harmon coming in as a love interest.

You mentioned that Moonlighting came on the heels of Remington Steele. Caron wrote many of the episodes of Steele's first season and you can see how he was influenced when he created Moonlighting. This quirkiness would carry over in his other series, Now and Again and Medium (and it's not easy to be quirky when you're dealing with a psychic who helps the police catch serial killers).

I would argue that the qurky humor was very much a problem with the show, as it soon took on a very smarmy cast to it and began to be solely about the humor and not the actual, you know, stories the series was purportedly telling...I stopped watching the show after that second season when I realized the producers and writers had no interest in entertaining their audience; they were far more interested in amusing themselves.

And I think we made it very clear that the death knell for the show was when Maddie and David slept together. Nothing after that could put the show back on track, and the introduction of the Mark Harmon character only served to drag the show even further off track.

[Eddie Love]

I was a big MOONLIGHTING fan from day one and even at the time it was obvious that the nature of the show (and it's meteoric popularity) made things kind of unsustainable. In the show's earlier days the humor was actually somewhat goofier and when it became hipper and self conscious things just seemed to burn faster. (Similar to the groundbreakingly downbeat storylines on MIAMI VICE, which were daring and original and then quickly predictable.) But I also think the hook-up of Dave and Maddie was inevitable, and that if things had been drawn out with no pay-off ala Laura and Remington Steele it would have belied the sophisticated nature of the show.

I loved this episode of the show though and you guys covered a lot of ground. I'm glad you gave some qualified props to the frustratingly uneven second X-FILES movie that Derrick rightly points out is a great looking film.

I'd throw out one more title of a series that outlived it's initial reception and it's a curious one -- namely the BRIDESHEAD REVISITED mini-series which was hailed as an instant classic and was revered by viewers many (most?) of whom were no longer watching when it concluded.

[smang12345]

A payoff is fine but I remember watching Moonlighting and it was a funny show initially. And then they hooked up and you had David standing in the rain all miserable and trashing his car out of frustration, etc... and the comedy of that show was dragged kicking and screaming behind the sound stage and shot in the back of the head execution style.

Oh, and Cybil Shepard was so incredibly hot it was insane.

[Derrick]

Dec 27, 2010 13:53:45 GMT -5 tombitd said:

Dec 27, 2010 13:15:00 GMT -5 drewshi said:

Moonlighting didn't suffer from the quirky humor. That's a staple of its creator, Glen Gordon Caron. It suffered from the stormy relationship between Shepard and Willis off screen and it died when they consummated the relationship on screen. Fans were willing to go through all the zaniness from the special episodes to to the fourth wall breaking to Maddie getting married to Mark Harmon coming in as a love interest.

You mentioned that Moonlighting came on the heels of Remington Steele. Caron wrote many of the episodes of Steele's first season and you can see how he was influenced when he created Moonlighting. This quirkiness would carry over in his other series, Now and Again and Medium (and it's not easy to be quirky when you're dealing with a psychic who helps the police catch serial killers).

I would argue that the qurky humor was very much a problem with the show, as it soon took on a very smarmy cast to it and began to be solely about the humor and not the actual, you know, stories the series was purportedly telling...I stopped watching the show after that second season when I realized the producers and writers had no interest in entertaining their audience; they were far more interested in amusing themselves.

And I think we made it very clear that the death knell for the show was when Maddie and David slept together. Nothing after that could put the show back on track, and the introduction of the Mark Harmon character only served to drag the show even further off track.

For awhile there in the 80's, Mark Harmon was like the go-to guy when a network tried to save a series. Wasn't he brought on in the last seasons of FLAMINGO ROAD and CHICAGO HOPE?

[chrisj]

The first three seasons of Moonlighting are easily some of the best television I've ever seen. As it was a detective show, the stories definitely needed a certain craft to them (which I thought they often got right in those three seasons), but the plots were always secondary to the characters and dialogue for me. While it could step over the too goofy line now and then, it's definitely one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd had fantastic chemistry on screen, despite a testy relationship off screen. And I thought the episodes in the vein of "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" and "Atomic Shakespeare" were brilliant.

[Eddie Love]

Jan 2, 2011 17:37:21 GMT -5 chrisj said:

The first three seasons of Moonlighting are easily some of the best television I've ever seen. As it was a detective show, the stories definitely needed a certain craft to them (which I thought they often got right in those three seasons), but the plots were always secondary to the characters and dialogue for me. While it could step over the too goofy line now and then, it's definitely one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd had fantastic chemistry on screen, despite a testy relationship off screen. And I thought the episodes in the vein of "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" and "Atomic Shakespeare" were brilliant.

I agree completely and also think that the mystery plots of those initial seasons had more heft than the plots of the typical REMINGTON STEELE episode. And while I think the humor got somewhat self-conscious, I still vastly perfer those laster shows to the sitcom-y vibe of the Doris Roberts period on RS.

[drewshi]

I agree completely and also think that the mystery plots of those initial seasons had more heft than the plots of the typical REMINGTON STEELE episode. And while I think the humor got somewhat self-conscious, I still vastly perfer those laster shows to the sitcom-y vibe of the Doris Roberts period on RS.

Roberts came into the show after Caron left it. Make of it what you will. I never liked the series after she came on board either. Have my first season of RS for the memories.