Moonlighting is streaming for the first time — and the show’s creator says it was something Bruce Willis had been “excited” to have happen.
Glenn Gordon Caron talked about the ’80s hit dramedy making its streaming debut on Hulu Tuesday and shared a health update on Willis, who played wisecracking detective David Addison opposite Cybill Shepherd’s Maddie Hayes, a former model who owned the Blue Moon Detective Agency. Willis, 68, has frontotemporal dementia and retired from acting in 2022.
“The process [to get Moonlighting on streaming] has taken quite a while and Bruce’s disease is a progressive disease, so I was able to communicate with him, before the disease rendered him as incommunicative as he is now, about hoping to get the show back in front of people,” Caron told the New York Post. “I know he’s really happy that the show is going to be available for people, even though he can’t tell me that. When I got to spend time with him we talked about it and I know he’s excited.”
Caron visits Willis, 68, about once a month and keeps in contact with the star’s wife, Emma Heming Willis. He called it “mind-blowing” to witness the impact that the neurodegenerative disorder has had on the larger-than-life action star. “The joie de vivre” Willis was known for “is gone.”
“I have tried very hard to stay in his life,” Caron said of his “extraordinary” friend. “The thing that makes [his disease] so mind-blowing is [that] if you’ve ever spent time with Bruce Willis, there is no one who had any more joie de vivre than he. He loved life and … just adored waking up every morning and trying to live life to its fullest. So the idea that he now sees life through a screen door, if you will, makes very little sense.”
When they are together, he thinks Willis knows who he is within “the first one to three minutes” of their visit. However, “He’s not totally verbal. He used to be a voracious reader … and he’s not reading now. All those language skills are no longer available to him, and yet he’s still Bruce. When you’re with him you know that he’s Bruce and you’re grateful that he’s there, but the joie de vivre is gone.”
Moonlighting is off to strong start
All five seasons of Moonlighting, which aired from 1985 to 1989 and focused on the bickering and sexual tension between its two main characters, are now restored and on Hulu. The show’s had a strong start, jumping to No. 2 on the Top 15 list as of Wednesday.
As what took so long getting it to air, the music was a factor, according to IndieWire. There were rights issues related to its soundtrack. Some of the songs have been replaced, but those performed by the cast are intact. Last year, it was maybe going to be on Disney+, but that didn’t pan out and Caron went into talks with Hulu.
“It’s taken years for us to get the resources together and it was a big effort and I’m extraordinarily grateful,” he told the New York Post.
Willis’s wife has promoted it on her husband’s behalf, just via Instagram. The day it debuted, Heming Willis called it “happy news” and said “you bet our family will be watching,” ending her post with “David Addison and Maddie Hayes forever.”
Caron said it was hard getting Willis cast at the time, which was pre-Die Hard, because ABC didn’t see him as a “leading man” and didn’t think he had chemistry with Shepherd. They were wrong. After the show started and it was a hit, “I used to take Bruce to ABC and we would walk down the hall and the female assistants would just swoon. But the people making the [casting] choices were 30- and 40-year-old men so they didn’t have the same perspective.”
Shepherd talked to the same outlet about meeting Willis.
“My temperature went up at least 10 degrees and I thought, ‘This guy is the one,'” she recalled. “I always knew not to act on [our chemistry]; we came close, Bruce and I, because we were both very attracted to each other, but we managed to just stop and not to fulfill that, and it had a huge amount to do with the success of the show. We fought for Bruce to be in the show… Bruce was funny, brilliant, sarcastic and real and we couldn’t have chosen a greater co-star.”
That doesn’t mean it was always roses. After all, their careers were booming and they were ready to move on from the show. Shepherd once told Entertainment Weekly, “I remember at one point in the show, it had gotten to where we just hated each other. It was a very volatile show,” she said of the program, which also starred Allyce Beasley as receptionist Agnes DiPesto and Curtis Armstrong as her mate Herbert Viola, “but that’s also what made it great.”
Shepherd participated in Willis’s 2018 Comedy Central Roast, talking about their “explosive” chemistry. After his dementia diagnosis, she said, “I will always love Bruce.”
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