Right place, right time, right actor: The Moonlighting rewatch
Unless you are of a certain age (the age where your back hurts for no good reason at all), you likely don’t know much about Moonlighting, a romantic comedy/mystery show that ran from 1985-1989 and starred a pre-Die Hard Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. The chemistry between the two leads was sizzling and the “cast of charming weirdos who solve crimes” formula was still relatively new at the time, so Moonlighting felt like it came from another planet. A fun planet where everyone was sexy and banter flowed like wine. It was a huge hit.
Eventually, Willis’ rapidly-rising star began to rub the notoriously jealous Shepherd the wrong way (she had a similar reaction to being outshined by Christine Baranski on the show Cybill a decade later) and the on-screen bickering became a mirror of what was going on off-screen. Not to put their enmity all on Shepherd, of course; I somehow doubt Willis was enthusiastic about solving the mystery of the week once he was the hottest new action star in Hollywood. Moonlight chugged along, but by the last season, the shine was very much off the moon, so to speak, and nobody was terribly sorry to see it go.
I remembered liking Moonlighting a lot and watched it religiously when it aired, but I hadn’t seen it since. Willis being Willis meant that Moonlighting wasn’t available to stream anywhere until it recently landed on Hulu, and I never bought the DVDs or anything. But hey, my husband was out of town and I had nothing better to do (a phrase that comes up so often in these posts I’m thinking of changing the name of the newsletter) and figured why not enjoy a little walk down memory lane. At worst, I figured it would be as problematic as all the other stuff I liked in the 80s; at best, it would be cute, if very dated.
What happened next genuinely shocked me.
The pilot follows a plot not dissimilar from Schitt’s Creek: wealthy ex-model Maddie Hayes discovers that her accountant has made off with her millions, leaving her with just her house, her car, and a detective agency she owned as a tax write-off. She goes there to shut it down and recoup some of her money, but eventually ends up entangled in a mystery. And yet this didn’t feel like an artifact of bygone decades. The clothes were truly something to behold (so. much. pastel.), and the pop culture references were of course wildly out of date, but with a few minor tweaks, you could use that exact script today. Is it that Moonlighting was progressive, or just the things it was calling out are still issues today? Yes.
So that was a surprise, but that wasn’t the shocking thing. No, what blew my mind was that I still remembered exact lines of dialog. Plotlines. I remembered specific details from each and every episode of that first season. I don’t walk around reciting them; I had no idea I had this information in my head. But there I was, delivering David Addison’s punchlines before he did, anticipating Maddie’s pouts before her mouth twitched. I recalled immediately that Miss Depesto fell for the murderer in one episode, and that said murderer was played by her real-life husband.
How did I know all of this? Why did I know all of this?
Ask me about Tom Baker’s run of Doctor Who and I can answer in minute detail because I watched those episodes over and over and over again for many, many years. I still do, in fact. Conversely, I liked Simon & Simon and Riptide at least as much as I did Moonlighting, but I don’t remember much about them at all. There was a giant pink helicopter named the Screaming Mimi. And a robot. Everything in the 80s had a robot at some point. Vague images, but nothing terribly specific.
So what was it about this show that caused bits of it to fuse to my memory, seemingly forever? To try to figure it out, first I did a little research on how we form memories.
It’s pretty well known that certain events become memories because of the strong emotions associated with them — that’s why you can summon perfect images of your wedding day or that time you got in a really bad car wreck. Adding other senses makes memories stronger, so smells will conjure up flashbacks of bygone Thanksgivings and certain songs will always remind us of middle school. None of that really applied to a tv show from the mid-80s that I saw once (maybe twice if there were reruns)…or did it?
When we tend to think of the “strong emotions” that can crystallize memories, we go with the extremes: love, sorrow, shame. I certainly didn’t experience any of those watching middling detectives go through the motions each week. But I certainly felt something. Rewatching Moonlighting, I began to feel the echoes of what 14-year-old me experienced and it came to me: Bruce Willis knocked my socks off.
Bruce Willis — by which I mean David Addison — was good looking, but not so handsome that you’d be scared to talk to him if you met him. He was clever. He was cool. He was confident. And that cleverness and coolness and confidence came out in his speech. He was quick-witted and sly, with a mastery of language that allowed him to monosyllabically threaten a thug in one breath and break into iambic pentameter in the next. He didn’t talk like anyone else, and everyone loved him for it.
You don’t have to be a TV detective to figure out why an overly smart, word-obsessed teenager who felt like she didn’t fit in anywhere gravitated toward him.
I won’t bore you with my “I wasn’t cool in high school”, because it’s aggressively ordinary. I was incredibly smart and had a way with words that my peers didn’t. Being smart was considered Very Bad in my school, and being overtly intelligent was even worse. It’s bizarre to me that my community’s culture shunned those who excelled at anything that required intellect, but then again you don’t have to go deep into recent political chasms to see that it’s not all that unusual. It was hard being clever and feeling like I was supposed to feel bad about it, because I didn’t.
Apparently, young Susan watched Moonlighting to indulge in the fantasy that there was a place for someone whose brain (and mouth) worked just a little faster than the average bear’s. That you could be a grownup who stood out in a crowd and not feel bad about it. That there were people who would recognize verbal agility and appreciate it. And that fantasy helped her deal with reality, which told her the exact opposite — and still does, to be honest.
If you’d asked me a few days ago why I enjoyed Moonlighting, I would’ve said something like “It was funny and Bruce Willis was cute.” And that’s certainly true, but the real answer is more like “It made me feel less alien without drawing attention to the things about myself that I couldn’t change but wanted to.”
And also, it was funny and Bruce Willis was cute.