Stay Tuned #52: Moonlighting (Pilot)
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
Premiering on March 3, 1985, and reminding me once again of the things that I am older than, Moonlighting was a then-trailblazing, multi-award-nominated-and-winning, prime-time detective dramedy (one of the first truly successful dramatic comedy series of its quality and type) starring a budding Bruce Willis (pre-Die Hard) and a recovering Cybill Shepherd (after a string of poorly-received films and TV movies) as bickering private detectives with near-immediately established romantic and sexual tension. It ran for five seasons of costly (but worth it) and troubled production (including a perfectionist director, airing delays, and cast injuries), growing on-set animosity between the two leads, diminishing lead interest and ratings (Willis began to pivot toward theatrical movies, and Shepherd toward a parenthood sabbatical), and a prematurely resolved romance before being cancelled in 1989. It taught me what the word, "duress" means, and was my first established memory of being introduced to Shakespeare and non-animated meta-humor.
The phrase, "once in a blue moon," actually means "once every two or three years," but I'm the Ticketmaster four to five days a week, every week, and I just needed something for the a.k.a. that ties into today's review (which was not on the Time Drops calendar for the week), and Blue Moon is the name of both the detective agency and a fictional brand of shampoo in the series (though I looked it up, and there is a brand of organic hair-care products called bluemoon by O-Way USA), so now you know.
I was also debating whether to do this as an issue of Just the Ticket or Stay Tuned because Moonlighting is a TV show, but its pilot episode was a two-parter that was released on VHS back in the day as a movie (which I - read: my parents - owned a copy of). Also, don't get this confused with the actual Moonlighting movie from 1982 starring the voice of Scar himself, Jeremy Irons; it's totally different.
Also-also, from Full Moon Features, to Moonfall, to the giant alien robot angel inside a moon-shaped ball of energy in the Date A Live movie, to the anime series Tsukimichi: Moonlit Fantasy, I thought this would be a good way to cap off my inadvertent moon obsession and transition into the List Lookback review for next Friday, so please don't be a Moonlighting Stranger to Just the Ticket, and remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, let me know what M-O-O-N spells down in the comments, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't get eclipsed, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my lunatic content.
The movie, or feature-length pilot episode (simply titled, "Pilot," as most such episodes are) begins with a businessman/pilot being chased through repeating footage (that's a partial pun because some of the shots are of the characters' feet) by an extra from the Grease movies (the late Dennis Stewart, who played a different character in each movie) who looks less like a greaser and more like a roadie for the Sex Pistols because of his "Anarchy" vest and spiked mohawk, screaming that this movie is set in the 80s before we so much as see a vehicle. The punk almost shoots the man, who is soon hit by a car, and no one bats an eye when he rushes up to pretend good Samaritan so he can mug the body for a wristwatch and run off.
Enter Madolyn "Maddie" Hayes (Cybill Shepherd), a semi-retired actress and model whose accounting firm stole all of her liquid assets (and I can't remember if TV writing had evolved beyond episodic storytelling such that this would become one of the duo's cases in the future). Her Italian stereotype live-in chef (who cooks in a suit for some reason) instructs her on the elasticity of bad checks and good pottery, and a visit to her lawyer reveals that she can liquidate her business investments and write-offs to get back on her feet, which brings her to the City Of Angels Detective Agency, where poetry-obsessed receptionist Agnes (Allyce Beasley, the voice of Miss Grotke in the Recess franchise) and smooth-talking goofball detective David Addison (Bruce Willis) have been employed to run it as a failing business.
For someone not expecting the high-words-per-minute, overlapping dialogue that this series became known for (a quality that led to the creation of the series' revolutionary fourth wall-breaking cold opens as a way to pad the hour-long runtime of each subsequent episode, doubled the page count of the average primetime script, and drove the actors insane with the irregular and over-long work schedules it took to memorize their lines), these first scenes can be off-putting, but as soon as worlds collided, it was like a switch flipped, and comedy magic was born. From their first exchange of dialogue, David and Maddie's chemistry triggered something nostalgic in me. Even something as prima facie unfunny as her "no flies on you" line reads like a throwback to the days when golden-age cinema had to suggest its way around taboo topics like sex and profanity (the line itself probably a concise, TV-friendly way of saying, "you're not full of shit after all!"). As such, the first episode(s) of Moonlighting are chock-full of instantly quotable lines and gut-busting visual gags, and David's advances are more tastefully and comfortably written than one would expect from romantic films of its time, or even later eras.
This also holds true for his efforts to convince Maddie to work with him and prove that he's perfectly capable of running a successful agency just as well as an intentionally failing one.
After a chase scene between the mohawk punk and quite possibly the best villain/henchman duo in TV history (the coldly creepy Simon, played by WarGames' Dennis Lipscomb, and his strong, silent goon with no name, played by Brian Thompson...who would go on to play Shao Kahn in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation‽), which shows that 80s car chases are more exciting when the people get out of their cars and chase each other on foot - or in elevators - we get a cool scene where Mohawk passes the watch to Maddie before falling dead with a knife in his back, suggesting that Simon or his goon killed Mohawk offscreen, but there may be another player at large (North By Northwest's Robert Ellenstein as Heinz, who, based on the name of the character and the turns the case takes, might be an escaped Nazi war criminal, but nothing is stated outright, not even his name).
Following more of David's shenanigans (including ambushing Maddie with a press conference featuring Mary Hart and the crew of Entertainment Tonight), the duo are ambushed, captured, and subject to "duress" by Simon (whom Maddie calls by name at one point despite having never seen him before and no one but her mentioning him by name - I watched the movie twice to make sure because the first time, I couldn't stop saying, "I fucking love this guy!") and his goon, escape, bicker some more, and finally decide to beat the villains to the punch and solve the case with only a third of the runtime left.
Unfortunately, the whole, "how did Maddie know his name was Simon?" plot hole is just where the movie begins to show its seams. Heinz kills Simon offscreen as he waits for our leads in the back of their car, after which he fails to fill his shoes as an entertaining villain. Sure, Ellenstein does a good job with Heinz's financial desperation (the watch is a gutless, broken heirloom used to hide clues to a bag of millions of dollars in smuggled WWII-era conflict diamonds) and cold, generic villainy, but he doesn't measure up to Lipscomb as Simon.
The finale sees David and Maddie attempt to scale what can generously be called a clock tower (the dead man from the beginning was the son of a WWII fighter pilot and watchmaker, who presumably built or designed the building so he could hide the diamonds without anyone noticing), which gives Maddie a decent female empowerment moment (before needing to be rescued by David, who somehow knew there was a maintenance ladder inside the tower, rendering the climbing stunt pointless and putting Maddie in even more peril that he has to rescue her from when the ladder falls over at a greater-than-terminal height from street level). Upon returning to safe ground (with the ladder still protruding over the side of the building next to them) and finding the diamonds, they are held at gunpoint by Heinz, who immediately proves himself to be an incompetent villain by following David out onto the unstable ladder in pursuit of the diamonds instead of taking Maddie hostage as leverage, and falling to his death because "Moonlighting (Pilot): Part Two" is almost at the end of its runtime.
Some time later, David is still trying to convince Maddie to partner with him at what will become the Blue Moon Detective Agency because her entire character in this movie, when you strip away the dense, snappy dialogue and interceding action and drama, boils down to "I hate danger and must pretend to disagree with everything David says because I'm a snooty, white woman in an 80s rom-com." Recycle press conference ambush, roll credits with iconic theme song by jazz legend Al Jarreau, and that's a wrap.
The research kind of ruined this one for me in retrospect, and by itself, the Moonlighting pilot movie has noticeable flaws, particularly in its third act. But the nostalgia is strong here anyway, Willis, Shepherd, Beasely, and Lipscomb are joys to watch, and the comedy is legitimately in-the-moment funny.
Plus, for better or worse, without Moonlighting, we would not have things like Burn Notice, Psych, or Castle in our lives, and cinema-quality television would not exist. Credit where credit is due.
B+
If you are a creative voice, don't let ambition get in the way of making what you love the best it can be, please don't be a Moonlighting Stranger to Just the Ticket, and remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, let me know what M-O-O-N spells down in the comments, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't get eclipsed, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my lunatic content.
Ticketmaster,
Out.
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