Trivia / Moonlighting

• Actor-Shared Background: Bruce Willis worked as a private investigator before getting into acting.
• Career Resurrection: For Cybill Shepherd. Although she was a popular film actress in The '70s (with roles in hits such as The Last Picture Show, The Heartbreak Kid (1972), and Taxi Driver), her input steadily declined in the early '80s. This show's critical success and high ratings revived Shepherd's screen career, in addition to being a Star-Making Role for Bruce Willis.
• Creative Differences:
  • Cybill Shepherd feuded with showrunner/creator Glenn Gordon Caron and eventually had him fired. This wouldn't be the last time Shepherd had the showrunner fired.
  • Not that Bruce Willis didn't have some of his own - he wasn't happy about "Father Knows Last", feeling the airplane set constrained him.
• Creator Couple: Demi Moore made a cameo appearance during season 5. She and Bruce Willis were still married at the time.
• Directed by Cast Member: Dennis Dugan who played Maddie's temporary husband Walter Bishop would go on to direct five episodes in season 5 and ultimately directed the series finale.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Subverted and played straight with "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice"; ABC at first threatened to veto the episode due the fact that it switched to black and white for half the episode and even threatened to air the entire episode in color, against the wishes of the creative team. To get around this, they shot the dream sequences on black and white film rather than color film which would then be turned black and white to keep the suits from undoing the conversion process. However, the network forced them to do a disclaimer at the start of the episode, which led series creator Glenn Gordon Caron to hire Orson Welles to do an introduction where he praised the show for doing the flashback sequences in black and white.
  • "It's a Wonderful Job" was originally written to be the farewell episode for Cybill Shepherd (see Troubled Production below), and would have had Maddie killed off at the end. ABC obviously did their best to ensure it never happened.
• Hide Your Pregnancy: Cybill Shepherd became pregnant towards the end of the third season. Maddie's wardrobe becomes much bulkier to hide it and she eventually gets on a plane to Chicago during the fourth season so Shepherd could take maternity leave.
• Hostility on the Set: The onset conflict between Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd has been well documented. His success with Die Hard further strained their relationship. He became a major film star, and bristled at being the second-billed actor on a TV series and resented her, blaming her for many of the shooting delays.
• In Memoriam: "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" opens with one of these cards for Orson Welles who appeared in the introduction scene. Welles passed away five days before the episode aired.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For ages, the show was unavailable on video and was withheld from syndication due to the low episode count (barely 60-some episodes) as well as the enormous pile of cash required to secure the music royalties. Anchor Bay released the pilot in the late 90s, but it wasn't until 2007 that the series FINALLY got a DVD release as all five seasons came out. Due to the aforementioned music issues, the series has not been released to Blu-Ray. In October 2022, Glen Gordon Caron tweeted that he was working on bringing the show to streaming. One year later it was added to Hulu. However, international viewers who can't access Hulu remain unable to watch.
• Reality Subtext:
  • Allegedly (much like their characters), Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd did not like each other, despite their in-show romantic involvement.
  • Willis has noted in interviews that just prior to doing a screentest for the show, he flirted with Cybill in the elevator, which for him was the real audition. Shepherd supports this in her autobiography by claiming that they almost had 'a thing' but chose to keep it non-sexual. YMMV on whether or not any of this is true, because she claimed in the same autobiography to have turned down Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, among others.
• Schedule Slip: The Troubled Production meant that there were constant delays between episodes, with some gaps running several months without a new episode. The show frequently made fun of their inability to put episodes out on a proper schedule.
• Star-Making Role: For Bruce Willis.
• Troubled Production: The series as fraught with production delays and on-set issues, to the point that its problems were lampshaded by ABC in an ad campaign:
  • While it was being produced, the series was one of the most expensive television programs ever made. As a result of overlapping, fast-paced dialogue between the main characters, the scripts often ran up to 120 pages^note  with the TV standard being 1 minute per page. , it cost more than $1.5 million dollars to film each episode, and production was almost always behind schedule (not helped by series creator Glenn Caron, who would often rewrite dialogue on-set during filming).
  • The well-known episode "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" cost a then-unheard of $2 million to film and took 16 days to shoot, largely due to Caron's insistence that the filming use actual black-and-white film instead of shooting in color then decolorizing it. Even then, ABC was displeased with the episode and, fearing backlash from fans who wouldn't understand the concept, had a disclaimer run before the episode informing viewers of the filming change.
  • Cybill Shepherd was reportedly burned out by the long filming times and production issues, coupled with the fact that she would be receiving new script pages the day they were to be filmed. Not helping matters was the fact that Caron blamed her for the delays in production, referring to her as a star who "already reached the top of the mountain". Things got to the point where, in the fourth season, Caron reportedly left the production for good because of the tension between Shepherd and himself, arguing that he believed the network would pick her over him if it came down to a corporate decision.
  • Bruce Willis (who played David Addison), by contrast, started out the series being very friendly to Shepherd and the production crew. However, once Die Hard became a smash hit, he realized he was meant for a movie career and became detached from the job, as well as had a strained working relationship with Shepherd.
  • The production delays were so severe that ABC ran an ad campaign showing network executives waiting for new episodes to appear at their company headquarters. Further production delays (including Shepherd leaving production to give birth to twins and Willis suffering from a skiing accident) only exacerbated the problem.
  • When Shepherd returned from her post-pregnancy break, the writers forced her character into a storyline where she spontaneously married a random man she met on a train (in a bid to recreate the tension between David and Maddie), despite Shepherd herself vehemently protesting it. This led to a further ratings decline, and the series' eventual cancellation at the end of its fifth season.
• What Could Have Been: In 1985 ABC had a pair of relatively unknown comedic actors whom they were very high on and were looking for vehicles for. They also had two comedic pilots who needed a male lead. They were going to give one of them each show but considered both actors for both shows. One of those actors was Bruce Willis, who got Moonlighting. The other was Alan Thicke, who they cast in the other show, Growing Pains. But it very easily could have been Willis cast in Growing Pains and Thicke landing in Moonlighting.

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