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MOONLIGHTING
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MOONLIGHTING
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Moonlighting
THE SERIES: The premise of Moonlighting, a romantic comedy set in the Blue Moon Detective Agency, may have echoes of the William Powell/Myrna Loy Thin Man movies, but it definitely carved out a quirky identity all its own. The leads, Madeline Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) and David Addison (Bruce Willis) shared a sexual tension which they channeled into witty repartee while they solved cases.
They could hardly have avoided tension of some sort. Maddie was a sophisticated shampoo spokesmodel who somehow acquired the detective agency and became a hands-on owner. Until then, David, a hard-partying bad boy-type, had run the place.
A second tier of characters was used mostly for laughs, but sometimes carried the show, especially when the leads went missing from time to time for various off-camera, "real-world" reasons. These characters were Agnes DiPesto (Allyce Beasley), the receptionist at Blue Moon known for answering the phone with spontaneous rhymes; and Bert Viola (Curtis Armstrong), a fledgling detective with a certain nobility hidden within a scruffy shell.
The series broke usual detective show conventions and allowed the characters to address the viewing audience, and granted them self-awareness of their TV existence. It also made liberal use of such devices as dream sequences and musical numbers.
THE SERIES | FINAL EPISODE | OUR TAKE | TRIVIA | TV GUIDE | INFO NEEDED TOP OF PAGE INDEX OF SHOWS
Moonlighting
FINAL EPISODE:
THE STORY: Under the cover of black satin sheets, David Addison shares pillow talk with a beautiful blond. The woman is Annie, cousin of Maddie Hayes, and is speaking of leaving her husband, who resides in New York, to start a new life. David wonders if she's talked this through with her husband. "I'm doing this for myself, not for him," she says.
At the Blue Moon Detective Agency, corks pop and champagne flows. Maddie Hayes enters in time to relieve a spray of bubbly, which brings a sudden pall to the proceedings. Maddie assumes that Addison is behind the unruly atmosphere, but he has not come in for work yet. The celebration, Agnes DiPesto explains, is because she and Herbert have announced their upcoming wedding. Maddie is overjoyed and grabs a bottle for herself.
David enters and gets the news. He kisses DiPesto, who asks if he would give the bride away. "I'd be honored," he replies. Addison congratulates Herbert, who requests a meeting in David's office.
Behind closed doors, Herbert doesn't look so good. In fact, he's puking his guts out and bear-hugging a waste basket, and hasn't been able to keep anything down since Agnes popped the question.
Meanwhile, Agnes is likewise bending Maddie's ear. She wants to make sure she's doing the right thing, and wonders how come she's still attracted to guys? "Because you're still alive," answers Maddie.
In David's office, Herbert airs his reservations. "Marriage is a noble endeavor," he declares, with his head positioned deep between his knees. Addison asks Bert if he loves Agnes. Bert assures him that he does, but that he's daunted by the magnitude of the sacrifice that marriage represents. Namely, forsaking all other women forever.
Addison agrees the sacrifice is great, but can only see a limited number of options: Fooling around, or the preferred course, being a loyal and faithful husband with a vivid imagination.
Bert concedes, and to show how serious his commitment is, gives his collection of erotic lithographs to Addison (a great ice-breaker for first dates), and asks if David would consent to being his best man.
A bit later, Bert's avowed office enemy, McGillicuddy, approaches him with an olive branch and offers his heartiest congratulations. McGillicuddy is anxious to settle accounts, saying that he just got the test results back from the doctor and has been told he has a heart condition. Bert is extremely suspicious as his rival offers to throw a small bachelor party. NEXT: THE HUSBAND SHOWS UP
THE SERIES | FINAL EPISODE | OUR TAKE | TRIVIA | TV GUIDE | INFO NEEDED TOP OF PAGE INDEX OF SHOWS Moonlighting, cont.
A new man enters the detective agency office, a man familiar to Maddie who gives him a hug. it is Mark, the husband of Maddie's cousin Annie. He's in town on business and is anxious to see Annie, whom he still loves. "She's so unpredictable-- I never know what she's going to do next," he says.
Maddie, looking to head off trouble, explains the situation to David as he comes through the doors of Maddie's office. "David," she says. "You remember my friend Annie. This is her husband." David, caught by surprise, jabbers a greeting and backpedals from the room.
To add to the tension, Annie enters the agency to visit David and to tell him that she's just consulted a divorce lawyer. She's decided that the fair thing to do is to not take a dime from Mark. David sweeps her into his office, directing Bert to bar the door behind her while he distracts Mark. Bert is then to take Annie sightseeing; anything; just get her out of here.
Addison re-enters Maddie's office and embroils Mark in a baffling interrogation about the current state of living conditions in New York ("What is the weather like these days? Is it a dressy sort of town? Do people wear ties?") The smokescreen serves its purpose, and soon the office is cleared.
After Mark's bewildered departure, Maddie scolds David for dismantling Annie's marriage. David defends himself on the grounds that she's an adult and can make her own decisions.
As Bert takes Annie on the town, a mysterious figure watches them depart from the parking garage. A seedy man who somehow rates the Perry Mason theme as his background music. He follows the departing pair in a junky Pontiac.
At David's apartment, later, Bert and Annie arrive loaded down with Disneyland souvenirs. They had fun. David gets rid of Herbert, embraces Annie and breaks the news to her that her husband is in town. This is fine with her, since it gives her a chance to get this into the open. "I couldn't stand being without you today," she tells David.
Later, at the office, Agnes informs David that Mark wants to meet with him at high noon. "He's no dummy," says Agnes. Noon finds David and Mark at a restaurant, toasting martinis to Annie.
"I think we should talk about it," says David, but Mark cuts him off.
"I've hired a detective to find out who the lucky guy is," says Mark. He hired someone from a competing detective agency, so as not to put Maddie in the middle, to follow Annie. Mark wants to shatter the home wrecker's kneecaps-- but only if he's not good enough for his wife. If, on the other hand, the man is better for her, Mark will step aside. But if he breaks her heart, he'll kill him. NEXT: A BROKEN JAW
THE SERIES | FINAL EPISODE | OUR TAKE | TRIVIA | TV GUIDE | INFO NEEDED TOP OF PAGE INDEX OF SHOWS Moonlighting, cont.
At a mall, Bert and Agnes shop for wedding stuff. Bert becomes aware that he is being followed, and recognizes the shadow as the guy who was tailing him at Disneyland the day before. Agnes doesn't believe Bert is being followed, and chalks up his jumpiness to nerves about the impending wedding. She leaves him in the mall and goes to shop for lingerie.
Bert spots a man on a bench reading a newspaper, who looks like the guy. Bert tears the paper out of the guy's hands and quickly finds that the man is just a bewildered old man. Agnes catches Bert's actions and storms out of the shop wearing skimpy underwear to scold him.
Soon, Bert and Agnes arrive back at the parking garage. This time, Bert catches sight of the shadow in the side-view mirror of a parked car. He sends Agnes away and confronts the follower.
Bert and the follower break into a scuffle, and Bert takes the worst of it, left on the garage floor with a broken jaw among other injuries. Agnes discovers him and runs to get an ambulance, advising her sweetheart to not "let anybody park on you."
Annie enters David's apartment, bags of groceries in her arms. There are noises in the apartment: The sound of a shower running, and of female laughter. Annie cautiously creeps across the floor to investigate. Pushing open the bathroom door she spots, through the clouded glass of the shower stall, the figures of David and a female companion getting clean.
David steps out of the shower to find Annie packing her suitcase and abruptly leaving, with few words exchanged.
David returns to his shower companion. The woman, wearing a flesh-colored bathing suit, is one of the Blue Moon detectives, under the impression that she's doing undercover work. Addison pays her for her services and she leaves.
It's wedding day, and the event is taking place outdoors. Bert is there, with jaw wired shut and arm in a brace. McGillicuddy, still playing the helpful soul, straightens Bert's tie, and David fools around with a radio-controlled toy helicopter. David spots Maddie and hugs her, but the warm greeting is not returned. Maddie scolds David for his shabby treatment of Annie.
The wedding is observed by Mark's private detective from behind a trellis. Mark approaches the detective to tell him that he's off the case; he and Annie are back together. She broke it off with her lover and has returned to Mark. But the weasely detective is loathe to give up the case. "I've got a civic responsibility," he says, voice full of personal dislike for Bert.
The ceremony begins, and falls a bit short of the day that every bride dreams of. Bert's vows are unintelligible through the wiring on his jaw. Agnes reads his part instead, and it still proves to be a somewhat touching moment, until Bert spots the detective in the crowd. Bert goes ballistic and lunges for the shadow, knocking the preacher into a nearby swimming pool. That being the universal signal for a brawl to break out, one does. In quick order, all involved end up in the pool.
The vows are finally completed but at the police station, while mug shots are being snapped. Charges are dropped, so the group is being processed and released. The female detective who helped David out earlier approaches Maddie to tell her how much she enjoyed her undercover assignment, and hoped that she would be doing more. This is the first Maddie had heard of the "assignment', and pieces together what David did to push Annie back into her husband's arms.
As the crowd files out, Annie, now back in the arms of her husband, catches David's eye and flashes a look of betrayal. David knows it was for the best, however. NEXT: CANCELLATION
THE SERIES | FINAL EPISODE | OUR TAKE | TRIVIA | TV GUIDE | INFO NEEDED TOP OF PAGE INDEX OF SHOWS Moonlighting, cont.
Later, the familiar elevator door facing the Blue Moon Detective Agency slides open, and David steps out. As he enters the office, it is apparent that something is amiss: The office is vacant. A man in a suit emerges from an inner office. He is carting things out in boxes. David stops the man to demand an explanation. The man introduces himself as Walter Whitebread of ABC-TV, and he delivers a crushing pronouncement to David: "You don't know, do you? You're canceled."
In the outer corridor, things are getting stranger. Herbert is sobbing over the dead body of his former enemy, McGillicuddy. Through his wired jaw, Herbert wails that McGillicuddy said he had a bad heart, but that Bert didn't believe him. Whitebread corrects the assumption: "It wasn't heart failure-- He just doesn't have any more scenes."
Maddie steps out of the elevator and passes Bert, who is carting the body out under his good arm, in time to meet the end of the world as she knew it.
David tries bouncing Walter off the wall a few times, but it's a futile gesture. In six minutes and fourteen seconds, their world is scheduled to cease. The rapid deterioration is marked by the view of the city through the agency window. Maddie watches on in amazement as a worker carts it away, revealing the "city" to be nothing more than a printed backdrop.
David cracks a joke about Maddie's underwear and through that gains new hope; where there's crass humor, there's hope. He pulls Maddie along on a race against the inevitable. They leave the studio and spot Agnes, a friendly face. Only it's not Agnes, but the actress who portrays her; the two distinguished by the fact that the actress lacks Agnes' rhyming skills (The best rhyme she can come up with for 'cabbage' is 'basement'.) The actress berates David and Maddie for failing to work out their relationship and consequently costing the entire cast their jobs. She leaves them in despair, clinging to a thin hope for a spin-off series.
The clock is winding down and David's last best idea is to visit an important producer named Sy to plead for a reprieve. Sy, a cigar-smoking faceless god-figure in a darkened screening room has no sympathy for the Moonlighters. "Even I can't get people to watch what they don't want to watch anymore," he lays it on the line. The magic, he observed, has been bled from the series. "Romance is a fragile thing, and once it's over, it's over." The platonic relationship that David and Maddie now share won't cut it with the viewers.
One last ditch effort. If the audience wants romance... David and Maddie find a preacher to perform a quick matrimonial fix, but the padre refuses, citing desperation as an improper motive. He walks away.
David and Maddie, having played all their cards, finally accept the reality of the situation and ponder "If we just had these five years to do over again." The last word is Maddie's: "After all we've been through... I can't imagine not seeing you tomorrow."
A montage of past highlights play out, to the strains of Ray Charles singing the gentle romantic ballad, "We'll Be Together Again", and a final legend, "Blue Moon Investigations ceased operations on May 14th, 1989. The Anselmo Case was never solved... and remains a mystery to this day." NEXT: OUR TAKE
THE SERIES | FINAL EPISODE | OUR TAKE | TRIVIA | TV GUIDE | INFO NEEDED TOP OF PAGE INDEX OF SHOWS Moonlighting, cont.
OUR TAKE: <to be added> The Anselmo Case, mentioned in the closing legend, was an case which was referenced in several of the final season's episodes.
THE SERIES | FINAL EPISODE | OUR TAKE | TRIVIA | TV GUIDE | INFO NEEDED TOP OF PAGE INDEX OF SHOWS
TRIVIA
- Timothy Leary played the preacher at Bert and Agnes' wedding.
- The song playing over the closing montage of series film clips is "We'll Be Together Again," performed by Ray Charles in a 1961 recording, from a CD entitled Ray Charles and Betty Carter (with the Jack Halloran Singers).
TV GUIDE LISTING
CLOSE-UP:
LUNAR ECLIPSE< to be added >
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INFO NEEDED: Please drop us a line if you spot any factual errors, or know of additional information that might be appropriate to include. Please provide documentation, if possible.
In addition, we are looking for a source for episode Neilsen ratings.
Plus, we are interested in contacting anyone connected with the series or final episode of Moonlighting, for interview purposes.
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