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Recently, Hulu started streaming Moonlighting, the show mainly famous for a) making Bruce Willis into a star and b) being almost totally unavailable in the modern age. I used to think streaming meant I'd be able to watch anything I wanted, any time I wanted like those lucky ducks in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, but now TV shows and movies are literally vanishing from streaming platforms and being memory-holed by their own production companies, and my brother, who is a die-hard physical media weirdo, laughs at me smugly as he fondles all the movies he literally owns that no one can take away from him.

And yet, in this atmosphere of memory-holing, Moonlighting has appeared after being more or less a legend amongst the Olds since it went off the air (ignominiously) in 1989. There was a perfunctory DVD release in the early 2000s, but it was bastardized due to music rights that made certain sequences of the show impossible, and so the show hasn't been available on any streaming platform, which these days means it's essentially not available (the DVDs are out of print, and I don't even own a DVD player any more).

I was a high school-aged lad when the show's pilot premiered in March, 1985, and yet somehow a TV show starring a 1970s movie star I'd never seen in a single film (Cybill Shepherd) and a dude no one had ever heard of (Bruce Willis) in a story about a retired fashion model working as a detective in a pale His Girl Friday style captured my teenage attention. I was a big fan of Moonlighting when it was on the air, but I haven't though about it much since. As it hits streaming there are some thinky pieces out there talking about how revolutionary and innovative it was, and this is true. But as I tour some of the old episodes out of curiosity I am compelled to also remind everyone that as inventive and revolutionary as Moonlighting was, it also sucked, because it was 1985 and in the 1980s we just had much lower standards than we do today.

In 1985, Moonlighting was the 23rd most popular show on television. The Top Ten wasn't exactly scintillating: The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Murder, She Wrote, 60 Minutes, Cheers, Dallas, Dynasty, The Golden Girls, Miami Vice, and Who's the Boss? I'm not saying that these shows didn't have entertainment value (or that I didn't watch some of them), but any TV lineup that includes both Dallas and Dynasty is obviously a TV lineup starved for any kind of innovation and revolution, no matter how thin. I mean, The A-Team was still on the air. The Love Boat was still on the air. Fantasy Island had just been canceled the year before. TV in the 1980s was awful.

But it's all we had. Many of these shows were competently made, and could be very good—but there weren't a lot of creative chances being taken. Cheers was a reliable joke machine, but it wasn't going to uncork a musical number or air an episode that was a pastiche of Bergman films or something like that.

So Moonlighting had two advantages immediately: The chemistry between Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, which was legitimately terrific, and the vague gesture at a kind of fast-paced, comedic dialogue that hadn't been seen in a while. Once the show began experimenting a bit more with form, introducing lavish dream sequences, musical numbers, and strange, surreal extended jokes that broke the fourth wall (an episode in Season Three ends before the story is resolved because the production staff want to go home, so they barge in, take all the props, and break down the set, leaving the actors (still in character) to hug it out and wish each other a good summer).

Some of that stuff is legitimately terrific, even 40 years later! The show had moments of real brilliance (or at least real fun). Looking back, it's easy to see why it impressed folks (like me). We didn't have much to choose from, and even though video rentals existed back then it wasn't the same as being able to just dial up whatever you want to watch. Moonlighting blew minds, but it did so more or less by default because there wasn't much competition in the weird-avant garde-surprising category of television.

By default because Moonlighting was, in many other ways, a pretty mediocre show.

Watching the Moonlighting pilot (which originally aired as a 2-hour movie and backdoor pilot) today is excruciating. The pacing is janky, the story is not great, and while there are some effectively cinematic shots and thoughtfully composed scenes, it feels slow and extremely padded. Like, extremely padded. The only thing that saves it is Shepherd and Willis' interactions, which feel like a completely separate show and which are delightful.

Much of the rest of the show's run wasn't too far off from that sad beginning, unfortunately. For every unexpected moment when the show gave us an entire episode in iambic pentameter, there were five episodes with relatively tired mysteries and a lot of vamping. Willis and Shepherd often lean into the overlapping bickering act, but it's often without purpose: Just two people talking very fast over each other. There aren't a lot of jokes or plot movement in those exchanges. It's just volume, and a way to burn off a few minutes of screen time.

For example, in the aforementioned episode that ended with the staff breaking down the set, the last minute and forty-five seconds is Willis and Shepherd slowllllllllly saying goodbye and getting into their cars. Sure, they're riffing humorously on the whole "will they/won't they" thing that people liked so much, but watch this fucking sequence: It is painful. It is awkward. There are no jokes, no meaningful exchanges. It is literally a show stretching out a scene to fill time, and this is not an isolated incident.

Context matters. You watch Moonlighting today and you might think people are insane calling this show a classic that changed television. When you realize it was up against Growing Pains, it starts to make a little more sense.

Also, re-watching these episodes made me realize that I still use the phrase "I'm sorry to say, I'm sad to report, that I haven't seen anyone/thing at all of that sort" in daily conversation and I'm not sure what that says about me except that as a teen I siphoned all of my father's liquor from the kitchen cabinet and it shows.

NEXT WEEK: Lupin and boring uber-competence.

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