My Substack followers know that I’m working on a novel set in the 1980’s.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the world when I was 15. I’ve always been a reader first, but two television shows shaped my teenage years.
One was early MacGyver, the adventurous hiker and climber who carried a Swiss Army Knife, drove a black Jeep YJ, and made me want to learn about everything.
But the biggest influence was Moonlighting.
I loved David Addison’s effortless cool, his brilliant comebacks and his taste in Motown music. And in some ways, I wanted to be him.
Moonlighting posed as a detective show, but it was actually an old-fashioned 1940s screwball-comedy. Mysteries were just a framework for the romantic tension between the two main characters, played by Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd.
In an era when television was serious and even the comedies were overly-earnest, Moonlighting threw out all the rules.
Chase scenes ended in food fights and soap suds. They did song and dance routines, made film noir and Shakespeare episodes, broke the fourth wall, and did cold opens where the lead actors spoke to the audience in character.
Moonlighting really is a time-capsule of what was great about the 80’s, when we could still laugh at ourselves without being ‘triggered’.
Today I’m bringing you the inside story on the creative chaos and private feuds at the heart of that decade’s most original TV show.
I’m joined by Scott Ryan, the author of Moonlighting: An Oral History, The Last Days of Letterman, Always Music in the Air, and other books. He is the host of the YouTube series Tiger Talk, and co-president of Fayetteville Mafia Press and Tucker DS Press.
You can read more about him on his website.
We spoke about Moonlighting’s most creative episodes, the chaos and fighting on-set, and the myth the so-called Moonlighting Curse.
It’s a really fun conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it even if you don’t remember the show.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
Moonlighting streaming on Hulu
You can listen to Personal Landscapes: Conversations on Books About Place on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, Google Podcasts, Audible, PlayerFM, and TuneIn + Alexa.
Please subscribe, and rate the podcast or leave a review.
Your support is greatly appreciated.
