Produced by Glen Gordon Caron, Moonlighting featured high-fashion model Maddie Hayes (played by real-life former high-fashion model Cybill Shepherd) and fast-talking private eye David Addison (played by then-unknown Bruce Willis). The series’ story began after Maddie’s business manager embezzled most of her fortune, leaving her with her house and the Blue Moon Detective Agency, designed by the wily accountant as nothing more than a tax write-off and consisting of detective David Addison and secretary Agnes Dipesto (played by Allyce Beasley). The romantic tension between David, a smart, slovenly, party animal and womanizer, and the beautiful, haute couture–attired, snobbish Maddie lasted for two seasons. After this point, complications on and off the set led to a plotline in which Maddie juggled relationships with David and another suitor, briefly married a third man, had the marriage annulled, and suffered a miscarriage.

The series’ importance lies not so much in its convoluted plots as in its unique and sustained fusion of elements characteristically associated with two distinct genres into the emergent genre of dramedy. On the one hand, Moonlighting clearly exhibits the semantic features of television drama: serious subject matter dealing with incidents of sufficient magnitude that it arouses pity and fear; rounded, complex central characters who are neither thoroughly admirable nor despicable; textured lighting—both the hard “tele-noir” and diffused lighting accompanied by soft camera focus; multiple exterior and interior settings; and single-camera shooting on film. On the other hand, the series combines the “serious” elements with the syntactic features of television comedy. These comedic features include a four-part narrative structure (consisting of the situation, complication, con fusion, and resolution); the metatextual practices of verbal self-reflexivity, musical self-reflexivity, and intertextuality; repetition (i.e., the doubling, tripling, and compounding of the same action or incident until the repetition itself becomes humorous); witty repartee; hyperbolic coincidence; and a governing benevolent moral principle within which the violent, confused, often ironic dramas of good and evil and seriousness and silliness were played out.

A full appreciation of the sophistication of Moonlighting involves a level of cultural literacy (both popular and classic) rarely required by prime-time television series, which was one reason the series drew accolades from critics early on. Titles of Moonlighting episodes intertextually referenced the narrative premises as well as titles, authors, and even visual techniques of films, novels, dramas, poems, and plays from the 16th century through the present (e.g., “It’s a Wonderful Job,” “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” “Atlas Belched,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Blonde,” “Twas the Episode Before Christmas,” and “The Lady in the Iron Mask”). Another episode titled “Atomic Shakespeare” provided a feminist version of “The Taming of the Shrew,” performed, except for the bookend scenes, entirely in iambic pentameter. Additionally, in many episodes, protagonists Maddie and David break the theatrical “fourth wall” convention with self-reflexive references to themselves as actors in a television program or to the commercial nature of the television medium. Such metatextual practices are techniques of defamiliarization that, according to certain formalist critical theories, epitomize the experience and purpose of art; they jar viewers out of the complacent, narcotic-like pleasure of familiar forms and invite them to question and appreciate the artistic possibilities and limitations of generic forms. Moonlighting’s use of these metatextual practices signifies its recognition of the traditions that have shaped it as well as its self-conscious comments on its departure from those traditions; thus, the series displays characteristics typically attributed to works regarded as highly artistic.

The series’ artistry in fusing the genre features of drama and comedy in such a way that it was both popular and critically acclaimed paved the way for such other innovative “dramedic” ventures as Frank’s Place, Northern Exposure, Sports Night, and Ally McBeal. Moonlighting also led a number of critics to declare that, with Moonlighting, American television had finally come of age as an art form.