MOONLIGHTING Finally Set To Hit Streaming In October
Glenn Gordon Caron’s masterful 1980s series, Moonlighting will finally be available for streaming. All 67 episodes of the Cybil Shepherd–Bruce Willis series will hit Hulu on October 10, 2023.
Running from 19985 to 1989, Moonlighting saw Shepherd play Maddie Hayes, a down-on-her-luck model who finds that her final asset is the Blue Moon Detective Agency. She sets out to run the company with unorthodox P.I. David Addison. Willis was born to play wisecracking David Addison and he makes for a great foil against Cybil Shepherd’s uptight company boss. The one-liners are delivered thick and fast in the series which took its cue from the screwball comedies of the 1930s.
Moonlighting played with genre conventions and style – and Gordon crafted a series which still stands up today. Fantasy and Shakespearian episodes sat side by side with traditional mysteries – and there was even a whole episode set to the music of Billy Joel that features a well-choreographed sequence set to the singer’s Big Man On Mulberry Street.
The road to streaming had been a long and complex one for Moonlighting. For years, the show has been bogged down in copyright issues with the music featured on the show. Most of those issues now appear to be resolved and the show will finally be available to a whole new generation.
Moonlighting was monumentally influential on young Movies In Focus when I first saw it in the 1980s. Nobody was cooler than Bruce Willis’ David Addison in the ’80s – and I became an instant of Willis – even before I saw Die Hard. My long love and affiliation with Motwon music and Ray Bans can be traced the whole way back to Glenn Gordon Caron‘s magnificent series. I’ve owned a DVD box set of Moonlighting for the best part of 20 years, so the series has never been unavailable to me – but it’ll be interesting to see what it looks like with a spruced-up remastering.
