Moonlighting (Pilot)

When I first watched this pilot episode back in 1985, I tuned in to see Cybill Shephard, and she was wonderful. But what I saw from then unknown Bruce Willis totally blew me away. He was incredible...an original. There was no one like him on tv at that time. The chemistry between the two was more than apparent from their first scenes together, and it kept me and millions of others coming back week after week to watch.

Wacky, witty and action-filled, this pilot gave a nice introduction to the characters and style of the show. Although several of the series episodes of Moonlighting were much better than this first movie, here we get a taste of the fast paced dialog and exciting banter between the two leads that was a hallmark of this great show.

It doesn't seem like it has been More than 20 years since this pilot hit the air. When you look at it now and see dial pay phones and no cell phones, you realize it has been.

The main plots in the pilot involves model Maddie Hayes being taken for all her money by bogus financial advisor's & $4 million dollars in smuggled diamonds that Maddie & David Addison accidentally stumble onto. This pilot relies upon two things which made the entire series a major success. The chemistry between Bruce Willis & Cybill Shepherd is the main thing. A clever script is the other.

While the script is a fresh approach, some of the sequences go back to classic material. The main finale sequence featuring some stunts, a tall building with a clock, and some breath taking moments draws upon the silent classic SAFETY LAST from Harold Lloyd for its inspiration.

All in all, this pilot is extremely effective introducing everyone and providing some top notch 1980's era music in its sound track. It is a key building block from which the rest of the series takes off on.

18 years later and Moonlighting is still a modern comment on human relations,love feelings of a man and a woman who have a great personality and work together...And all that with style and romance,character and sense of humor!

During the course of the series Moonlighting, Bruce Willis came of age as an actor. Since the series has been replayed on Bravo, I have re-watched and recorded 30 or so episodes. This series had some really good acting, but some of the best writing that has ever been done on network television. The show won Emmy awards several times over.

The funniest episode was Atomic Shakespeare. This was a parody of The Taming of The Shrew, with Dave and Mattie as Kate and Petruchio. This episode has a cooking musical number with Dave singing Good Love at their wedding. They put ninjas in for a fight scene and sunglasses on the horses to make them look cool. It had it all.

Maybe one of the great moments in TV was the episode Big Man on Mulberry Street. David flies home to NY when it comes out that he was married at one time. This is shocking news to Mattie, who did not know or suspect. The highlight is a musical number to Billy Joel's Big Man on Mulberry Street, with Dave and Mattie both dancing and an amazing dance from a Broadway dancer. There is a lot of compassion here as we see way into Dave's soul, and Mattie for flying out to NY to chase and watch over Dave. In the final scene she lays her head on his shoulder, and he invites her to leave it there for the next 20 or 30 years. It is touching and reveals the romantic intentions of the shows future.

The show took a strange turn when Cybil Sheppard got pregnant during the fourth season. She was out of the show for almost ten episodes. Bruce Willis carried it off wonderfully, with the continuation of good mysteries, occasional musical numbers, and even some wild Claymation dream scenes. But the fire between them was unattainable as there was too much physical separation between them. This also coincided with their characters sleeping together. Some thought that was the end of the good writing. Actually by the end of the fourth season and the fifth season, they had survived a writer's strike, and many slow production dates, because of the quality of the writing and film of the shows. Many of the writers were in high demand by then, with their Emmy awards and some of them began to jump ship. The show never recovered.

There has never been this kind of original quality since. This was Television at its very finest moments. There will never be another like it.

When a famous model (Cybil Shepard) loses everything she liquidates her remaining assets, including a detective agency bought as a tax write-off. Then she and the detective (Bruce Willis) get caught up in adventure.

I saw this when it was first broadcast and I spread the news about a great new series at a good friend's wedding reception--when I had absolute laryngitis and couldn't talk above a whisper.

Thank goodness Shepard had learned to act by this point in her career. Her on-screen chemistry with Willis is amazing and both together make the crazy story believable.

Though the series ran into well-known difficulties and in retrospect seems overrated (I certainly overrated it and I clung tenaciously on to the bitter end; forty years on I prefer "Remington Steele") this pilot movie still holds up as a great comedy-romance-detective story on its own. It's still one of my favorite pilots. It's too bad they can't all be this wonderful.