Now streaming on Hulu, ABC’s “Moonlighting” was one of the most unique shows on television during the 1980s. It was a witty caper with high-stakes drama fueled by sizzling will-they-won’t-they chemistry from the two leads, Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis (in one of his best TV roles) as private detectives.
The episodes were wildly ambitious, from the dizzying shots of Maddie (Shepherd) dangling from a clocktower in the pilot — a clear nod to Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last!” — to the entire cast performing Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.” But despite its initial success, it was canceled in the fifth season. The reason? The ratings plummeted to 70th place on the Nielsen charts by the end of Season 5.
“Moonlighting” had already started going off the rails in Season 4, when Willis was busy filming “Die Hard” and Cybill Shepherd was dealing with a high-risk pregnancy. “[M]y doctors really didn’t want me to work at all, let alone the typical grueling 12-hour days,” she told the Los Angeles Times. Creator Glenn Gordon Caron was also distracted by making his feature film “Clean and Sober.”
This created scheduling kinks that were difficult to iron out. So, the entire first half of Season 4 was forced to keep Maddie and David (Willis) apart, leading to strange plot detours, like David dreaming about a Claymation version of Maddie. For a show built on Hawksian repartee, this separation was disastrous.
Another factor in the ratings dip was that a lot of the sexual tension evaporated in Season 3 after David and Maddie finally consummated their relationship. This came to be known as the “Moonlighting Curse” — when two television leads finally get together, audiences can lose interest. Everything that had made “Moonlighting” so electric was gone, and the series never recovered.
Was Moonlighting always meant to fail?
Creator Glenn Gordon Caron knew “Moonlighting” asked a lot from Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. He told the Chicago Tribune, “Once David and Maddie entered, we stayed with them for the rest of the episode, so the burden on those actors was extraordinary.”
Working on “Moonlighting” was also a minefield of on-set feuds, which were sometimes blamed on Shepherd. The Chicago Tribune reported that an unnamed co-star said, “She’s the reason we got only four shots a day instead of 50. She brought 80 people to their knees.”
She didn’t necessarily get along with Willis all the time, either, telling The Scottish Daily Record: “Bruce Willis is a jerk.” Shepherd was also frustrated that Willis received a pay bump after “Die Hard” exploded into a massive hit (via The Morning Call).
But Caron — who was fired from “Moonlighting” before Season 5 — insists the downfall was a lot more simple than the thorny behind-the-scenes drama, telling Chicago Tribune: “I think America kind of sat down and ate this meal, heartily, and at a certain point said, ‘That was good,’ and pushed themselves back from the table and said, ‘What do they have at the salad bar down the street?’ … I just think they’d had enough for the moment, and now it was time to take a walk around the block…”
The cancellation never stopped “Moonlighting” from developing a cult following. Caron believes its resurgence on streaming is more meaningful after Bruce Willis’ dementia diagnosis as audiences get to appreciate him as a funny romantic lead.