TV Show Experiences

[mkaroly]

It is a shame Bruce Willis could not be interviewed for the book. Moonlighting was such a great show until it wasn't, and that final episode is too depressing to watch even to this day. Maddeningly frustrating.

[AndyDursin]

I'm sure the music issues are a problem, but even so, they've left a ton of money on the table by basically yanking the show out of circulation altogether. All kinds of '80s/'90s shows have been bid on for these streaming services or revived -- plus other shows have figured it out or made sensible replacements. With Willis' name and the fact there's still a fanbase out there, you'd have thought they'd keep the show in circulation. Talk about mismanagement. Who owns that -- is it DisneyABC? Something tells me they could have afforded it!

I vaguely remember watching the show. I was only in middle school when it was massively popular but remember seeing a bunch of shows. By the end though I had moved along. It's funny, just because the medium has changed so much, series today have a much better handle on "end points" than the network series of decades ago used to, when we were existing in much longer, 22-episodeish formats that were more episodic than serialized. Plus the shows that had "classic finales" were always dwarfed by shows that had miserable ends (like MOONLIGHTING or SEINFELD) or just never had an ending at all because they were canceled.

I will say Glenn Gordon Caron was a talented (if apparently extremely temperamental) writer-producer who seemed to have a good idea on how to start a show, but ran into a wall in terms of where it should go or end. There was a CBS series, NOW AND AGAIN, that he created back in '99, that was offbeat and funny, but the concept hit a brick wall and did not develop. It ended up petering out and was canceled after 1 season, when it started off so well and had received a lot of acclaim.

We've moved away from the 22-26 episode runs and I think for a lot of series, it's for the better. Shows can be conceived more like movies but with the additional character beats that TV can afford. Like I said back in 2015 when this thread started (!), so many filmmakers have flocked there and it's where projects that may have been set up as movies back in the 80s or 90s have migrated to.

Yet we also don't get a glut of filler or mediocre episodes in this form, which for so many series, you'd get -- naturally -- every year. It was next to impossible for any series to maintain elite quality over a 22-26 episode "seasonal grind". Obviously MOONLIGHTING had other challenges involved but it seems to some degree like one more project Caron burned himself out on before it reached a conclusion.

[Monterey Jack]

Yet we also don't get a glut of filler or mediocre episodes in this form, which for so many series, you'd get -- naturally -- every year. It was next to impossible for any series to maintain elite quality over a 22-26 episode "seasonal grind".

Look at Lost...for the first three (22+ episode) seasons, the show was LOADED with "filler" episodes (Hurley fixes a van! The mysterious origin of...Jack's tattoos! ), but the showrunners demanded a definitive end point from ABC when they'd been spinning their wheels for a while, and the remaining three seasons (all 18 episodes or less) had a lot more focus and narrative drive to them. People may quibble about the very ending of the series, but at least the creators were able to end it on their terms, and their timetable. Personally, it's one of the ways that television has evolved for the better over the last decade. I may not be a fan of the "'pump & dump" streaming model of a show releasing an entire season at once, but each season of a show now has much more consistent quality to it, and each episode contributes to the overall ebb and flow of the storytelling whereas an old show like Knight Rider you could miss out on a half-dozen episodes, and yet it's all exactly the same when you return to it months later, this stand-alone A-B-C plot that's resolved at the end with the cast sharing a laugh before the fadeout.

The downside is, there's less distinction now as to what constitutes the "good episodes" of a TV show, when each season is treated like a "movie". It'd be like, "Man,remember that fifteen-minute stretch of Raiders Of The Lost Ark around halfway through? Man, that was good!"

[AndyDursin]

Exactly, it works both ways. Many of these series are less like series than 4 or 5 hour movies.

Even though it had its share of "flabby episodes" that didn't advance the main story, LOST was still a show that defined what "weekly TV viewing" was all about, and may end up being one of the LAST shows to exist in that way -- you'd watch it, dissect it, talk to your friends about it. It had an interactive component that you lose with how TV mostly works today. That's the downside of losing the "weekly show experience". That, and also that certain days of the week, you'd know what would be on TV. You'd be spending time with the same show once a week at the same hour. That kind of thing -- like how you'd always look forward to a certain day and time because it meant ___ was on -- is also gone.

But it's also a sign of the times -- media, not just TV, is consumed entirely on a different scale, at an individual's pace, now. Everyone was watching 4 or 5 channels so there was a commonality in programming you'd share with others decades ago. That's gone. It's entirely independent viewing -- which is good because you have so many choices -- but it's also a little sad because there will be situations where people have never watched what you might recommend -- or never heard of it at all!

[Eric Paddon]

It is a shame Bruce Willis could not be interviewed for the book. Moonlighting was such a great show until it wasn't, and that final episode is too depressing to watch even to this day. Maddeningly frustrating.

Agreed. They should have done a last episode that ended with them together in a passionate clench and going off together to a future where no one had to worry about how to write their story any longer. The book indicates that there was supposed to be some final emotional words between Maddie and Dave but apparently by that point Shepherd and Willis were so much on the outs with each other that one of them (not named) wouldn't do it, forcing them to do an insulting montage bit to go out on.

[TaranofPrydain]

Moonlighting did indeed start brilliantly. But I came to watch it after the original run had ended , so the collapse was already known to me. There actually are three or four episodes in the final season that have the same pop of the early episodes, but that season was bookended with a bad taste miscarriage and then Virginia Mdsen as a female Mark Harmon. And even season four has some extremely inspired scenes. But the show needed both of its leads, and the way that fourth season opener was so depressing made that particular episode one of the most bone crunching experiences I can ever recall viewing.

[Eric Paddon]

This Newsweek cover from September 1986 best captures what a white-hot phenom "Moonlighting" was in its prime and fans like me thought there was a fascinating future before us that would last years. Six months later, the dark days were beginning to descen.

[mkaroly]

God I loved this show...lol...there was nothing like it before (though maybe His Girl Friday as a film was a distant ancestor). I have to give props to Curtis Armstrong; aside from his incredible turn as Booger in Revenge of the Nerds (an iconic role if there ever was one...lol...), I feel he brought a cool dimension to the show as Herbert and acted really well. As I have said before in previous posts, the final episode for me was devastating - the characters and audience deserved a better ending to the show...it is so hard to watch that last episode. I cared for David and Maddie and wanted desperately to see them together by the end; I know I was not alone in that. The final episode of Moonlighting and the final episode of MASH still make me cry to this day (albeit for very different reasons).

Such a great show that never matured to all it could have been. Ugh! Lol...