We have become pretty spoiled as a streaming society. There are so many shows we’ve come to love, and we are used to having them at our fingertips, from The Office being available on Peacock to the totality of Seinfeld being on Netflix. But one beloved television program has been lost to the archives for too long. Only, we’re now going to get it. Moonlighting will be made available to stream on Hulu beginning on October 10.
When it premiered on ABC on March 3, 1985, Moonlighting was unlike any other program playing on network television opposite it. Creator Glenn Gordon Caron modeled his stories after the fast-talking pitter-patter comedies from the 1940s, which pit Cary Grant against Katherine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell. And it made an overnight star out of New Jersey bartender and up-and-coming actor Bruce Willis.
The irony is that Moonlighting was constructed as a vehicle for Cybill Shepherd, who’d already had a movie modeling career to that point, and was being positioned as the lead for this hour-long comedy set in the Blue Moon Detective Agency. But Shepherd and Willis had combustible romantic chemistry, and an undercurrent to each Moonlighting episode became the build-up of the “will they or won’t they?” relationship between their characters, David Addison and Maddie Hayes.
Spoiler alert: They eventually did.
Shortly after kick starting his career on Moonlighting, Bruce Willis received yet another significant boost when his action movie Die Hard became a blockbuster sensation… and a strange addition to the canon of Christmas movies. From there, Willis would become a global superstar, best known for his roles in the action genre. But Moonlighting (as well as the sloppy but funny Blind Date from that same era) prove how adept Willis was at comedy, with his charisma acting as a secondary character helping him carry scenes and steal the show.
Bruce Willis lately has been generating headlines for different reasons. He recently was diagnosed with aphasia, a form of dementia, which hastened the announcement of his retirement from acting. Since then, his current wife Emma Heming Willis has used social media to update fans on the actor’s condition, as well as the support that he’s receiving from his close friends and family members. And his fans have been celebrating Willis’s body of work, from his films to the work he did on television. That includes Moonlighting, which is why we think it’s a tremendous win that we finally are going to have access to all five seasons and 67 episodes of the show at our fingertips. Well, beginning October 10, at least.
