Review: 'Moonlighting: An Oral History'

Not since the days when Adam West played comedy straighter than Gary Cooper or Micky Dolenz serially broke the fourth wall had there been anything like Moonlighting on TV. At a time when Dallas’ soapy entanglements passed for drama and Family Ties’ laugh-track clichés passed for comedy, Glenn Gordon Caron’s neo-noir absurdist romantic-comedy sparkled brighter than Cybill Shepherd through a diffusion filter. And unlike Batman and The Monkees, Moonlighting was pitched squarely at adults, what with its fixation on boinking.

As welcome as Moonlighting was in a mid-eighties television environment notoriously lacking in imagination, multiple issues conspired to derail its magical run. Stars Shepherd and Bruce Willis loathed each other. Shepherd loathed Caron. Caron often seemed intent on keeping his stars from sharing screen time. Shepherd successfully got Caron booted from his own show.

 

Yet amidst the egos, chaos, and the series’ very dated sexism, some great TV got made. Remember the black and white one that Orson Welles introduced? Or the one with the extended dance number set to that Billy Joel song? Or the Casablanca take-off starring underrated wing-people Allyce Beasley and Curtis Armstrong as Ms. Dipesto and Mr. Viola? Certainly everyone remembers the Taming of the Shrew episode. My high-school Shakespeare teacher even screened that one in class.

 

Scott Ryan addresses the tribulations and the fun swirling about Moonlighting in his delightful new book Moonlighting: An Oral History. As our tour guide, Ryan maintains a lighthearted, cheeky tone in keeping with the series, but he leaves most of the storytelling to Glenn Gordon Caron, Cybill Shepherd, Allyce Beasley, Curtis Armstrong, and numerous writers, actors, and directors. No, Bruce Willis is not among the interviewees, but his perspective is not really missed. After all, the book’s biggest star, Shepherd, rarely provides much insight and seems to conveniently not remember a great deal of what went down on the show or regard conflicts as being less intense than other participants recall. We get a lot more details out of Caron, producers Jay Daniel and Roger Director, writer Debra Frank, and Beasley, who still seems a bit bitter about how the stars sabotaged her show.

However, Moonlighting: An Oral History is hardly a bitter book. It is a celebration (complete with full-color photos) of a show that paved the way for so many other shows that barreled through network TV’s substantial barriers, such as Ryan’s (and my) personal fave Twin Peaks. Incredibly, for a show that was so popular, controversial, and influential, Moonlighting had never before been the subject of a serious book. It took more than thirty years since the series’ cancellation for the first one to be written. Fortunately, it’s terrific.