The following article is transcribed from an essay I wrote on May 15, 1989 -- the day after the last episode of Moonlighting aired. The Newsweek cover is an original scan from the Pop Culture Fiend Archives. Any additions or clarifications made during article transcription appear in brackets.
Moonlighting: How the Best Show on Television Came Apart at the Seams
I’m obviously not a network executive; I don’t have access to Hollywood inside information but I've followed the show from the very beginning and made the following determinations that help explain Moonlighting's staggering downfall.
Cybill Shepherd‘s pregnancy
Anytime a lead actress on a TV series becomes pregnant it's trouble. And anybody who watched Moonlighting regularly can tell you that it certainly spelled the beginning of the end for the show. It happened during the great '86-'87 season and by the time Mark Harmon showed up [to form the riveting Dave-Maddie-Sam] love triangle] the show was already shooting around Shepherd's pregnancy.
But Shepherd's pregnancy wasn’t the [only] problem... For some reason it was decided that the Maddie character would become pregnant as well. Now someone should have recognized that this was not a smart move. By making Maddie pregnant, the writers were painting themselves into a corner. They were committing themselves to a main storyline (i.e., what will happen with Maddie's baby? And will she and David stay together?)
The smart thing to do would have been to simply let Shepherd have her baby and write Maddie out of the show for the first few episodes of the '87-'88 season. The show was certainly popular enough at the time (9th in the ratings the previous year) and Bruce Willis was talented enough to carry several episodes by himself. Then, when Maddie returned (from wherever) she and Dave could get back to business as usual and their romance could take whatever direction the writing team saw fit.
The writer's strike
Show creator Glenn Gordon Caron and the Moonlighting writers had trouble delivering the normal amount of episodes to the network under normal circumstances. [Moonlighting was one of the most dialogue-heavy shows of its time, loaded with constant banter, sharp wordplay, flirtations and lengthy arguments between Dave and Maddie. This led to Moonlighting scripts typically being much longer than the average one-hour detective show.] So when the 1988 Hollywood writers' strike hit, the show got off to a very late start that fall and began to lose popularity.
Outside projects of the two stars
Simply put, Moonlighting gave Cybill Shepherd's career a rebirth and made Bruce Willis's. Willis was an unknown before landing his role, but soon proved himself to be a major TV talent as well as a natural for the big screen. He appeared on television specials, cut an album and played some live gigs, and in the summer of 1988 his movie Die Hard was a blockbuster. Soon after, Willis went on record saying he would do the last two years of his Moonlighting contract and then call it quits.
Shepherd also shot a movie during the show's run (Chances Are) and did a number of TV commercials. More importantly [after enduring a post-1970's career stall] Hollywood was interested in her again and she was getting all kinds of offers. Because of all this, Willis and Shepherd became distracted and in some episodes their performances suffered. In particular, Willis, who won an Emmy in 1987, looked as if he was just counting the days until his contract expired and he would be free to do movies full-time. Shepherd was slightly better but her acting seemed [apathetic] at times and she and Willis both seemed like they’d rather be someplace else. [Shepherd, for example, in efforts to be more comfortable during shooting, would insist on swapping her heels for a pair of Reeboks. This wasn't a big deal in and of itself, but given the context of what was happening with the show at the time, perhaps it was an indication that she was becoming spoiled and bored with the show.]
Bad choices by the show creators
When the '87-'88 season finally got underway, it proved disastrous. After finally sleeping with David, Maddie wound up flying home to Chicago in order to sort things out, while David, Bert and Agnes held the fort [at Blue Moon] in LA. Having Dave and Maddie in two different cities killed the fundamental premise of the entire show -- the friction and love/hate relationship between the two characters. Since the two were not interacting, the writers chose to focus some episodes on David and others on Maddie. [With the exception of the two-part "Cool Hand Dave" episode] most of these shows were just awful. (Remember the Pat Boone episode in which Maddie imagined what it would be like if David cleaned up his act?)
[The shows fans were not happy and] ratings began to slip drastically. Then, in what was perhaps the worst decision anyone could have made, it was decided that Maddie would marry a man she just met on a train. One can only assume that this was a desperate attempt to boost ratings [via shock value] and generate new interest in the show. But viewer response to Maddie's marriage was so overwhelmingly negative that the writers were forced to have her divorced two episodes later.
Natural decline in the quality of writing
[Jeff Reno and Ron Osborne headed the Moonlighting writing team and for two and half seasons the group was able to inject the show with some of the snappiest, wittiest and intelligent dialogue we would see prior to the debuts of shows like The West Wing (which Reno and Osborn also worked on) and Frasier. To this day, the "Atomic Shakespeare" episode of Moonlighting remains one of the single greatest pieces of television ever produced for a weekly prime time series -- right up there with "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" (the final episode of M*A*S*H) and the "A, My Name is Alex" episode of Family Ties.]
Indeed, Moonlighting was one of the most creative and imaginative series in the history of television and the fact that its scribes were able to maintain such high-level quality writing for as long as they did is testimony to their genius. But you can only go so far with the same characters in the same setting, and in the fifth season ('88-'89) the writers seemed to run out of steam. The storylines became thinner and the dialogue not as funny. The show began to rely more and more on the gimmicks (like characters breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly) that had made the show something special. In the first show of that season, Maddie lost the baby, finally freeing everyone from a storyline that should have never been pursued in the first place. The plan for that season was to start from scratch, but the damage had been done. Both the ratings and the buzz around the show had declined tremendously the season before and though all the ingredients seemed to still be there, the magic was gone.
So there you have it. As I sat watching the last 15 minutes of the last Moonlighting ever, I thought to myself, "So this is how it all ends?"
I thought about how I had been one of the few who had watched the show from the very beginning, before it became so popular. I thought about the pilot episode [which premiered so unusually in March of 1985 as a very late season replacement.] Later, I thought about how many people were missing this last episode [despite the fact that it was specifically written, shot and promoted as the series finale.]
It was a sad moment but those last 15 minutes with Dave and Maddie were great. When Maddie said, "I can’t imagine not seeing you tomorrow," it really felt like she (Cybill Shepherd) meant it. And then there’s a shot of Willis' face and he looked genuinely moved -- like he had all kinds of different feelings on the inside. [Like he knows that although things got awfully muddled along the way, nevertheless, this isn't the way the book should end.] That look on his face says it all.
Still and all, it was a great ending to a great show -- and it was great while it lasted.
So long Moonlighting, I’m gonna miss you...
I love that show.
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