How ‘Moonlighting’ Finally Arrived on Streaming

At long last, this week it was revealed that “Moonlighting,” the formative romantic comedy/drama that made Bruce Willis a household name and cemented Cybill Shepherd place in popular culture, will finally be coming to Hulu next month. Glenn Gordon Caron, who created the show, wasn’t sure it was going to happen either.

“I really thought it was going to be one of those things that was lost to the ages,” he told TheWrap in an interview conducted after the announcement was made. “There’s a moment where you go from being in the zeitgeist to becoming a kind of niche and then frankly, getting lost, just have no currency whatsoever because there’ve been so many other things that have been made that have been more interesting, that are newer. And I very much worried about that. That was a concern of mine.”

“Moonlighting” premiered in 1985 on ABC and ran for five seasons. Willis and Shepherd play private detectives, and much of the interest of the early seasons built around the will-they-or-won’t-they romantic dynamic between them. The show was known for willfully mixing both tones and genres into a single, intoxicating stew and for the palpable chemistry between the two leads.

What held up a streaming release for “Moonlighting” the most was, apparently, the rights clearances on the show’s music. When Caron first started reaching out about the show’s streaming possibilities about five years ago, he was told that the licensing issues associated with the music were too cumbersome and cost-prohibitive. Caron credits President of Hulu Joe Earley with first “sparking” to the possibility of “Moonlighting” coming to the streamer. Earley commissioned a review of the existing “Moonlighting” episodes.

“They started to do projections and realized that over the course of the five seasons — and there were five truncated seasons, we never really did 22 episodes — we used 300 songs, none of which anyone had any rights to at this point,” Caron said. This lead to a “really Herculean task,” involving securing access to those songs. But they were up to the challenge. “They loved the show and became committed to the idea of, Hey, let’s see if we can’t make this happen,” Caron said.

Over the past year, the team at Hulu began upgrading the episodes to HD (something that hadn’t been done yet in the history of the show’s lifespan) and making sure they had the rights to as many songs as they could. Other shows had hit similar snags; famously “The Wonder Years” arrived on Netflix without Joe Cocker’s cover of “With a Little Help From My Friends” as its theme music. When asked what percentage of songs were retained for the upcoming Hulu debut, Caron said, “If I had to put a number on it, it’s certainly somewhere in the 90s.” He confirms that this includes Al Jarreau’s iconic theme song.

“Here’s the thing, you can’t compel people to sell you the rights to their songs. And you also can’t compel people to sell you the rights of their songs for the price that works, for the budget that you have to make all this happen. So there are no songs by The Rolling Stones,” Caron stressed. But he said that the people from Disney that were working on this project “loved the show” and felt “honored to be working on the series and felt a sense of obligation to it.” He added that “nothing was done in an off-handed way.

Caron said that he is very happy with this new version of the series and laments the fact that it has “been gone effectively for 20 years.” There were “bad copies on YouTube” and long out-of-print box sets. “You had to want to see it,” Caron said. Now it will be beamed to countless homes on a service that they already subscribe to. “I’m excited to see if it endures,” Caron said.

And while the connection to “Suits,” a show that probably wouldn’t have been conceivable without “Moonlighting,” and its oversized success this summer on Netflix, is tenuous (Caron said that they’ve been working on getting “Moonlighting” to Hulu long before this past summer), it could be a bellwether for how “Moonlighting” will be received. “I think it portends good things,” Caron said of the USA series’ resurgence.

There’s an extra layer to the streaming debut of “Moonlighting” too. In March of last year, Bruce Willis’ family announced he had been diagnosed with aphasia and that he was retiring from acting. In February of this year, they told the public Willis had also been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

“It became even more poignant when Bruce started to fall ill. And I realized that most people think of him as a guy who carries a gun and mows down bad guys, and he has this whole career as a romantic leading man with all this incredible verbal virtuosity that most people, or a lot of people anyway, have never experienced,” Caron said. In fact, the initial discussion of why “Moonlighting” wasn’t available anywhere was partially sparked by news of Willis’ illness.

“I very much wanted to get the show out there. I’ve been talking to his wife, Emma. She very much wants the little girls to see it in its most pristine condition. I’m very proud of the show and thrilled. Again, this has been a very long journey for me to get it out there,” he explained.

Looking back on “Moonlighting,” Caron said that he doesn’t think about how difficult the show could be to make and how all-consuming the gossip about the two leads was. (For a show about two people who with such sizzling on-screen chemistry their off-screen relationship was, by all accounts quite chilly.)

“My recollection of making the show was of making friends that I still have to this day,” Caron said. Before the Hulu news broke, he was on the phone with much of the original cast – including Shepherd, Curtis Armstrong and Allyce Beasley. “It was a tough show to make because we were tough on ourselves. We wanted it to be really special. We wanted it to be worthy of the audience’s time. We also, frankly, were trying to distinguish ourselves from everything else that was on the air.”

At the time, Caron said, there were three networks and HBO “and that was kind of it.” He was in his early twenties. He was unamused by what he was seeing. Battery acid was running through his veins. “We really wanted, and Bruce shared this with me and Cybill to a lesser extent, but nonetheless shared it, this idea that, Hey, let’s burn this place down. Let’s see what we can do,” Caron said. “And we were stupid enough and lucky enough to be able to do that.” And now, he’s ready to burn down Hulu. But, you know, in the best way possible.

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