Bruce Willis' breakthrough 'Moonlighting' is back: How well does the '80s hit hold up?

 Launched in 1985, "Moonlighting" burned hot and burned fast. By the second season, the ABC series was a hit, by the third, a monster. It then jumped the shark, and after that the rails: The leads, Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, weren't talking to each other while production delays were constant. Viewers bailed by the fifth season and ABC followed. Just 67 episodes in total — a blink of the eye in '80s prime-time hit terms — "Moonlighting" was done by 1989. 

 Now, at long last, "Moonlighting" is back, this time on Hulu, which launched a remastered version Oct. 9. 

In a world where all of TV, past or present, sometimes seems no further away than a handheld remote, "Moonlighting" was the notable exception. Because the series used so much music — from the Great American Songbook to pop standards — licensing was prohibitively expensive. But except for some so-called "ambient" (background) music, this Hulu version has everything else, including Al Jarreau's famed title track and Billy Joel's "Big Man on Mulberry Street," which is part of an elaborate dance sequence in a third-season episode. 

It's been a long time so let's recap: Maddie Hayes (Shepherd) is a famous model, best known as the star of a commercial for Blue Moon shampoo, whose manager has ripped her off. Broke, she at least owns stakes in various money-losing businesses that were set up as tax write-offs. Those include a detective agency that's run by one David Addison (Willis). He's a wisecracking, harmonica-playing, sexist man-child who instantly antagonizes the boss. Nevertheless, in the March 3, 1985 90-minute pilot, they're drawn into a murder case, then nearly into each other's reluctant embrace. (That would come in time.) Thus, a classic '80s romcom was born.

 ABC had wanted a conventional detective series but "Moonlighting" creator (and Oceanside native) Glenn Gordon Caron had a much better idea. As he has long since explained, he intended to subvert that threadbare genre with Willis as his agent provocateur. But the network hated Willis and wanted nothing to do with him. Caron persisted because the then-unknown (and struggling) actor captured what he was looking for — the anti-hero with rough edges and smoldering sexuality. ABC wanted milquetoast. Caron wanted (well) Bruce Willis. Guess who was right?

'Eighties network dramas don't time-travel particularly well, and the "Moonlighting" pilot is no exception. Caron's dialogue is assured for the most part, but the plot strictly boilerplate, while Willis' Addison grates, charms, offends and irritates. In hindsight, it's easy to see ABC's point of view (who is this guy?) but Willis must have known what he was up against too (an entire network). This was his one shot which he wasn't about to squander. His performance isn't just self-assured but in-your-face — mostly in Shepherd's too. 

In fact, her big-screen career had stalled out and she must've seen "Moonlighting" the same way Willis had — as that second chance in a town that doesn't hand a lot of those out. As both battled for screen dominance, a famous chemistry was born — less sexual tension, more sibling rivalry. It was Shepherd who sanded those edges, and humanized the future big screen action star. To paraphrase the famous line about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, she did everything Willis did, just backwards in high heels.

Yes, "Moonlighting" gets better and fast. For newbies, head straight to the third season's "Atomic Shakespeare," or even better, the second season "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice," which best captures Caron's original subversive mission. In this episode, fourth walls are breached (a "Moonlighting" specialty), while most of it was filmed in black-and-white. There's also a particularly famous cameo, Orson Welles, who cold-opened the episode (he died not long after taping this). Does "Moonlighting" hold up all these years later? With episodes like these, remarkably well.