The Top 50 TV Shows of All-Time: #5
#5- "MOONLIGHTING" ABC 1985-1989------------------------------------------
There's no other show remotely like this one on the Top 50 countdown. Above all, this is because it's a romantic comedy, which are as commonplace on the small screen today as live appearances by Buddy Epsen. (In movie theaters, they're easily found, but painful to endure.) When series creator Glenn Caron showed the pilot script of "Moonlighting" to actress Cybill Shepherd, she told him she understood it. It was "a Hawks-ian comedy," she said. Having spent quite a bit of time around film historian Peter Bogdonovich, she was alluding to the show's rapid dialogue and other "screwball" elements reminiscent of many of the films of Howard Hawks. Caron had to go home and look up the reference. "Moonlighting" was sexy and stylish, wildly self-conscious (characters would frequently allude to the fact that they were on television), and it was loaded with plenty of popular source music from Motown and Philly Soul to popular chart-toppers of the day (the '80s). The witty repartee between the two principles, Shepherd and breakout star Bruce Willis, was layered with double-entendres, and in the case of Willis' character, a few singles. One episode might be a dramatic storyline featuring guest performers late of New York's famous Actors' Studio, the same one might degenerate into "Three Stooges"-style slapstick. One episode featured a black-and-white flashback introduced by Orson Welles (in his final screen appearance), and still another entirely off-the-wall episode was a comedic adaptation of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew," presented in full Elizabethan costume and with the dialogue delivered in iambic pentameter. The dialogue in general was often delivered so fast that "Moonlighting" scripts were said to be sometimes double or more the length of other one-hour programs. The series was so innovative that, for the first time in the 50-year history of the Director's Guild, a show was nominated by that body as both Best Drama and Best Comedy. Did I mention it was about private detectives? That fact was often only vaguely important.
posted by CM @ 9:00 PM
1 Comments:
I give you the credit for this observation years ago, Chris, but I always thought the most interesting thing about this show is how it appeared on television in an era with dozens of detective shows (from Columbo and the Rockford Files, up through Charlie's Angels, Hart to Hart, Magnum P.I., etc) but since Moonlighting, there has been none. There haven't been detective shows on TV in 20 years.
Moonlighting was so fresh and so original and blew away all the others to the point that the genre died. No one was going to break ground on a detective show that Moonlighting didn't already accomplish.
Kinda like how rhythm and blues music died in the 80s after Prince came along. No one was going to be more talented than that.
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