[00:16] Meg: Welcome to desperately seeking the 80s.

[00:18] Jessica: I am Meg and I am Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City.

[00:27] Meg: Where we still live and where we podcast about New York city in the 80s do ripped from the headlines.

[00:33] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:35] Meg: So we're gonna do something a little different today.

[00:37] Jessica: I know, and I'm delighted about this.

[00:40] Meg: And we actually said we were going to do this. And sometimes we say we're gonna do things and we don't really get around to doing it.

[00:47] Jessica: Just. But it doesn't happen.

[00:48] Meg: But this time we did. We watched the pilot episode of Moonlighting.

[00:55] Jessica: Because I didn't remember the pilot episode at all, but I was so excited. Cause I was like. When you said. When you suggested that as I was like, oh, my God, it's so perfect and it's so 80s. But of course, it was like a sense. But then after I saw it.

[01:19] Meg: In contrast to many shows that are in rotation, that. What do you call that when you see shows again and again and again? What do you call that?

[01:27] Jessica: Reruns.

[01:28] Meg: Reruns. Thank you. Oh, my God. I'm sorry. My brain.

[01:30] Jessica: Yeah, that's okay.

[01:31] Meg: Reruns. I mean, like, my kids have seen Friends.

[01:34] Jessica: Right?

[01:34] Meg: Right. They've seen Seinfeld. They've watched the whole **** thing.

[01:37] Jessica: No one watches Moonlighting.

[01:38] Meg: No one has seen Moonlighting.

[01:40] Jessica: And there's a reason for that. There's a very strong reason that we will discuss on this show.

[01:46] Meg: So Moonlighting, just to let everybody know, was a dramedy, hour long dramedy, starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis.

[01:57] Jessica: And it was, interestingly, because Cybill Shepherd had had a real heyday in the very late 70s and very, very early 80s, and she was sort of Peter Bogdanovich's it girl. The show was designed to bump her career back up again. And it was an opportunity to launch the new Bruce Willis that no one had ever seen before.

[02:22] Meg: So shall we get started?

[02:24] Jessica: Indeed.

[02:24] Meg: And, oh, and just to tell everybody. So we watched this separately. We have not discussed it at all.

[02:31] Jessica: Discussed is a good word.

[02:33] Meg: We've tried very, very hard not to.

[02:36] Jessica: Not a word.

[02:37] Meg: Talk about this off mic. And now we're going to dive in. Now I'm getting a sense of what you thought about it and I didn't before, but okay, let's get it.

[02:45] Jessica: And now we. Now we.

[02:46] Meg: Now we.

[02:57] Jessica: So, Meg, I'm just going to jump right in here from my perspective. While it was entertaining in some weird ways, I saw this as a cornucopia of errors.

[03:11] Meg: Huh.

[03:11] Jessica: Yes.

[03:12] Meg: I did not. I appreciated the opening because it really was a mystery, first of all.

[03:19] Jessica: Well, we didn't mention that in the. In the intro that it was a dramedy that was. They were. It's a private eye firm, and they're solving mysteries. Right.

[03:28] Meg: But they haven't met yet.

[03:29] Jessica: Correct.

[03:30] Meg: So it opens with Cybill Shepherd waking up, and we see her beautiful home. She's obviously a very.

[03:39] Jessica: No, we wake up with the guy with the wa. Like, going for the run.

[03:43] Meg: Both though, they. They go back and forth between those two people waking up. We've got Cybill Shepherd and we've got the guy who's a complete mystery person waking up and putting the watch on and going for the run.

[03:55] Jessica: Yeah. I'm just saying.

[03:55] Meg: He went, okay, great, great, great. Anyway, and so I was like, I'm intrigued. And because it was trope free, I really actually didn't know where it was going.

[04:08] Jessica: Yes. It was a blank slate. You. So the visual is as you described. Cybill Shepherd, who was so beautiful. It was ridiculous. Waking up in her satiny bedroom surrounded by. This is already where I started to laugh. All of her, because on the show, she had been a model. All of her magazines covers, and some of them were actually very famous photos of her that they mocked up as magazine covers. But my favorite was that they put in so little effort on one of them, the magazine was just called Fashion.

[04:43] Meg: Fashion.

[04:43] Jessica: I was like, oh, my God.

[04:45] Meg: Now, wasn't it weird when you heard her chef crashing all of her dishes? I felt like that was the beginning of something that was very unusual. And again, not a trope where it's like, that's a little violent.

[05:02] Jessica: Everything about the opening of her. Her opening. Not the guy we're gonna talk about in a second was so absurd and so badly written that it was like, you get the information pretty quickly that there's something wrong with her finances, because it turns out.

[05:21] Meg: And chef has not been paid.

[05:23] Jessica: Right. But he has not been paid. His. A check bounced once, and then it was, okay, this is the second bounce. And his reaction is to trash her belongings, but comically.

[05:39] Meg: But it's not funny.

[05:40] Jessica: No, it's not funny.

[05:41] Meg: It's scary.

[05:43] Jessica: And the Italian. He's Italian, so that. And 80s. So the trope is he's passionate and fiery, but the performance was like, that's a spicy meat-a-ball. It was so, so.

[05:54] Meg: It was so ridiculous. For some reason, Cybil Shepherd isn't screaming and running from the house. Because her chef is, like, dangerous. She's kind of like, this is strange. I thought I paid you.

[06:07] Jessica: Yeah, there's like, no.

[06:09] Meg: That is very odd. And the housekeeper is like.

[06:12] Jessica: The housekeeper who.

[06:14] Meg: You haven't paid me either, lady.

[06:16] Jessica: The housekeeper played by the woman who was Jerry Seinfeld's mother on Seinfeld. So these shows, and this was no exception. And by the way, that actress's name is Liz Sheridan. But you start to see people and you're like, oh, my God, you were in that. You were in that. I know you. I know, I know. Don't even say it yet.

[06:36] Meg: You're gonna let me say it.

[06:38] Jessica: No.

[06:38] Meg: Okay. So getting back to the guy who wakes up and puts on the watch. We don't know who this guy is. He is not Cybill Shepherd. He puts on his watch, he goes for a run. Again, rather 80s of him.

[06:52] Jessica: We see him putting on his sneakers, wearing very old school sweatpants. And like his socks. They're. They're. The way that they're filming it is really weird. Like what they're deciding to.

[07:04] Meg: I agree.

[07:05] Jessica: Home in on. It's weird.

[07:06] Meg: And also that the shoes were not Nike. I mean, they were not good running shoes. I was like, you are not going to have a lot of support when you're jogging.

[07:14] Jessica: They were tennis shoes, as a matter of fact.

[07:16] Meg: Right. And he's jogging.

[07:18] Jessica: Yes.

[07:19] Meg: And then as he is jogging, a barefoot man, which in and of itself very scary.

[07:27] Jessica: Weird, and never explained that he's barefoot.

[07:32] Meg: But also I. I was like, that would threaten me too if there was someone running barefoot next to me with horrific skin sunglasses. But what do you call them when they're really skinny?

[07:46] Jessica: Well, they were like goggles kind of. They're like swim goggles.

[07:50] Meg: A Walkman also, they focused the camera.

[07:53] Jessica: On the Walkman, which of course, at the time was nothing. It was the first Walkman. It was the metal one where you put the cassette in and you clipped it closed. So I had a moment of nice.

[08:08] Meg: And the crazy fakest Mohawk ever. You could tell it was made of acrylic. When he put his Walkman headphones over, you could see sort of hear it kind of like click in that acrylic kind of way.

[08:23] Jessica: Well, and he managed to bury the. Cause the sunglasses had an elastic across the back, which is why I thought they were goggles. And the strap went entirely into the Mohawk.

[08:35] Meg: Yeah.

[08:36] Jessica: So it was. Yeah, you're right. It was very acrylic.

[08:39] Meg: And he's the barefoot jogger.

[08:41] Jessica: Correct.

[08:42] Meg: Now, this is what was sort of exciting. He's got extraordinarily bad skin, which is. Which made me realize, of course, it had to be the same guy from Grease from the dance scene. And that was kind of awesome.

[08:57] Jessica: Crater Face.

[08:59] Meg: Was that his name?

[09:00] Jessica: So I did a deep dive on this guy. Can I just quickly tell you? Okay, so in Greece, he is Cha-Cha DiGregorio's boyfriend at the dance. He's very scary looking, of course. So I needed to know more about him because I couldn't remember Crater Face. So I was typing into Google, like, terrible skin, Grease, weird guy, acne. And that came right up. And then there was a sweet story that someone was interviewed about in his obituary. Someone was saying that, in fact, he was the nicest guy in Hollywood. And that when Grease was filming, the guy who played Eugene the nerd, Eddie Deezen, he was so early in his career, he had to take the bus to the set. And he was saying how hard it was to get there. And Crater Face picked him up every day of shooting and took him.

[10:01] Meg: What's his actual name? Not Crater Face.

[10:03] Jessica: It's like something. Stuart William (Dennis Stewart). Like, a really, like, bland name. But what was really interesting is that the makeup artist for Moonlighting put fake zits on top of his pock marks. It looked like small pox. It was like these, like, weird, like, growths all over his. It was the worst makeup. They must have given the makeup artist $0.50 and said, Work it out.

[10:32] Meg: I mean, he was clearly hired because he had bad skin. And then they made his skin even worse.

[10:37] Jessica: It wasn't forgiving. But for all of that that we have to say about this character, my favorite part about this character comes in maybe 20 minutes later into the show.

[10:50] Meg: Well, do you want to say that now? I mean, we're not gonna do a blow by blow. We can't.

[10:56] Jessica: So here's. Okay, so here's the thing that I found. The number one thing about the show was that whoever directed it clearly never directed anything before. It was an hour and a half of terrible timing, long lags, scenes that had to be edited but had never been. And as a result, there's a scene. So Crater Face winds up taking the watch off of the guy who's been jogging.

[11:26] Meg: The guy who's been jogging actually gets. He gets freaked out by Crater Face. So he runs into traffic and he gets hit by a car and dies. And then Crater Face takes the. The watch. Remember, the watch is very important. And he runs off with it, right?

[11:41] Jessica: And he had a gun. He was gonna shoot him, but he didn't have to. He didn't have to. So he runs off. Anyway, we find out that the. The watch is very important. And what then ensues is what I can only describe as a glass elevator race.

[11:58] Meg: Oh my God.

[11:58] Jessica: Which is so 80s. It was so bizarre.

[12:01] Meg: But come on, think about that for a second. I.

[12:04] Jessica: The glass elevator.

[12:05] Meg: Glass elevator.

[12:06] Jessica: Well, it was like Mel Brooks used that in High Anxiety to the same effect. But what was hilarious about this was that the scene took I think a full five minutes. And it was Crater Face in a glass elevator that was next to another glass elevator where the guy who he knew was trying to get the watch from him was in. And they just kept going up and down and like, I'm going to elude you. I'm gonna press lobby. Nope, I'm gonna go up to. They're staring at each other in the glass.

[12:38] Meg: Come on. It's dramatic because it's a glass elevator.

[12:41] Jessica: Well, I mean, if it hadn't been a glass elevator, you never could have done the scene. It was such a. It was so ludicrous. And, and then. And the guy who plays the guy who's trying to get the watch, I looked him up. His name was like something Lipscott or Lip. Lip something. (Dennis Lipscomb) He's always the stony faced sociopath like.

[13:05] Meg: And he predates the Anthony Hopkins Hannibal Lecter psychopath big time.

[13:14] Jessica: And at one point in this incredible elevator race he has. He flicks open the smallest switchblade you've ever seen in your life. And Crater Face goes crazy with fear in the elevator. And by the way, the guy with the switchblade is a middle aged, portly man. We've just seen Crater Face run a marathon barefoot. So it's like. And he has a gun. And so I'm like, crater Face, don't you think you might want to take it down a notch? I don't think this is such a big deal.

[13:52] Meg: But I will say the reaction that Crater Face had to the Anthony Hopkins esque kind of character made me realize, okay, this is the new guy to be scared of. Definitely.

[14:05] Jessica: Yes. His name in the show was Mr. Simon.

[14:09] Meg: I'm terrified just because of the name.

[14:12] Jessica: But any terror that you could have had about him evaporates in a later scene, which we'll get to. But it was my favorite scene in the entire show. But anyway, back to the elevator.

[14:25] Meg: Yeah. And without doing like a blow by blow. Cause we will be here all night. Long story short, Craterface gets murdered by.

[14:34] Jessica: And we don't know how this is again, why. This is how Did Simon get into the elevator? How did he get going? I saw the show. I missed something. No. There are so many plot holes.

[14:46] Meg: I kept rewinding to watch and I was like, did I fall asleep for a heartbeat?

[14:51] Jessica: No. They were just like, you know what? He's got to die. Move on. Put a knife in his back. Let's go.

[14:57] Meg: Put a knife in his back. And he hands the watch over to Cybill Shepherd, right?

[15:01] Jessica: He falls out of the elevator. She's been on a bad date and she's already met Bruce Willis. Because she has no money, her accountant embezzled everything. She owns a few businesses, she's got to liquidate them. One of the businesses is a detective agency that is run by the most annoying, smarmy, misogynist face you've ever seen. Fast talker, fast talking, nonsense, driveling. Thinks he's cute and actually talks out of the side of his mouth. Bruce Willis, so annoying.

[15:40] Meg: I kind of thought he was awesome.

[15:43] Jessica: I thought he, I love you. It wasn't that I didn't like him. Bruce, like the actor, I could see he was working on what he had.

[15:50] Meg: I love the character.

[15:51] Jessica: I hated. He was so condescending and so that it became. It was like, not fun. However, I remembered watching it at the time and being like, what a guy. Like, it just aged badly. So she's on a terrible date with a plastic surgeon and Bruce Willis comes to her at the restaurant. Crater Face falls out of the elevator, dead, hands Maddie Hayes the watch.

[16:20] Meg: Now it's on, but we're gonna flash forward. Cause it gets confusing when the police involve them and they're talking about the watch and da, da, da, da, da. And then it turns out Bruce Willis palmed the watch. Anyway, all of that gets very confusing and probably cause there are a lot of holes in this story, but what I love most is when. Can we just say that the psychopath now is a nazi.

[16:45] Jessica: No, no, he's not a nazi. You got it wrong. No, this is what I wanted to talk about. On top of everything else. One of the opening scenes, like a modest income family, extended family eating a dinner and having a birthday party for a little girl in the kitchen. And the grandmother comes in and she says, heinz Sie von is for you. And he goes in and in his German accent, the minute that I saw that, I was like, 80s mysterious German. He's a nazi.

[17:17] Meg: Right, right.

[17:18] Jessica: I thought you were saying that the Mr. Simon was a nazi.

[17:23] Meg: Aren't they all Nazis?

[17:25] Jessica: No, Mr. Simon's not a nazi. The only nazi who's trying to get the diamonds is the grandfather who's running after them later in the sweater vest, tie, and jacket with the German pistol.

[17:41] Meg: So who's Mr. Simon? He's also European.

[17:44] Jessica: No, he's not. He's just affected. Okay. No, he's not European. He's just, again, a plot hole. He's just some dude who knows about this and wants diamonds, but we never know how he knows about.

[17:58] Meg: Anyway. Okay, but when Mr. Simon and Mr. Simon's henchmen. Henchmen. Thank you. A lot. Goes down. But then, like, again, Bruce Willis applicable.

[18:10] Jessica: Information, we can't even tell you. We don't know how it happened. Great. So Bruce Willis has the watch.

[18:18] Meg: Bruce Willis has the watch. Cybill Shepherd thinks she's given the watch to the police. They are both tied up in Cybill Shepard's kitchen mysteriously by Mr. Simon and the henchmen, who then say, we're going to torture you to get the watch. But then ultimately they believe her that she's given not only that, the best.

[18:42] Jessica: Scene in the entire show. Again, like, who was writing this? That they're in her kitchen. She has an electric stove. They put the burner on. They're tied up in the kitchen. And to threaten them, out of nowhere, there's a knockwurst. And he's holding the knock as if Cybill Shepherd's character would have a knock. Knockwurst in the fridge.

[19:07] Meg: They came with a knockwurst.

[19:09] Jessica: They came with a knockwurst in their pocket. And they're holding it with metal tongs and searing it directly on the burner. And like, the smoke come. You know, the steam comes up from. And they're like.

[19:22] Meg: The implication being we're going to burn you.

[19:24] Jessica: Right.

[19:24] Meg: If you don't give us the watch.

[19:26] Jessica: Right. Which they know.

[19:28] Meg: And so they go.

[19:29] Jessica: Eventually they're like, well, we hope you're telling us the truth. And off they go. And the minute they're gone, she's like, you know, Savid, turn around. I can untie you this whole time. They could have just untied each other. Who wrote this?

[19:45] Meg: Okay. Yes, Very strange. Also, do you notice how many times she hit him?

[19:52] Jessica: Well, he called her a cold bitch in the opening.

[19:55] Meg: Yes, that is absolutely.

[19:56] Jessica: So my misogyny thing started with him not liking her, calling him and calling her a cold bitch.

[20:04] Meg: Yeah, she's been slapped. I'm not saying that he didn't deserve to be slapped, but there were two slapping incidents. And also hearkening back to when her chef was breaking all of her stuff. She breaks stuff in his Office. It's all very destructive and violent and a comedy. It's supposed to be comedic. That she's throwing a clock at his head and it goes through the window behind him. I'm just saying I found it a little unsettling.

[20:32] Jessica: Yeah. And he says, well, you're lucky I ducked. I'm like, no, you're lucky you ducked. Like, what the ****?

[20:38] Meg: You would have died.

[20:39] Jessica: Yeah. She hauled off with like, what looked like a ten pound clock. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. But weirdly, like, if only it had been used for character development. But no, no. So the other great thing that I love, I have to.

[20:55] Meg: Sorry, sorry. One more thing. Just a line that I thought was adorable.

[21:00] Jessica: Please.

[21:01] Meg: Cooties the size of oysters.

[21:03] Jessica: Yeah. What the fuck was that?

[21:04] Meg: There are lots of, like, outtakes. I know you're saying it was poorly written, but then there were some things where I was like, I love that.

[21:11] Jessica: Okay, well, there are a couple of things that I felt like Bruce Willis improvised, and there were two that really stuck out for me. One was that cooties the size of oysters. It's like you were reaching for that one. The other thing was, those of us who were thriving in the 80s know that one of the regrettable things that the eventually truly beloved Bruce Willis did was release an R and B album.

[21:37] Meg: This is true.

[21:38] Jessica: And on this album, there's a lot of harmonica playing. And in this pilot, they decide that she's gonna stay at his office and sleep on the couch. He goes into the other room, leaves the door open, and inexplicably, is while she's trying to sleep now he is playing harmonica and he's playing Blue Moon.

[22:03] Meg: Yeah.

[22:04] Jessica: Which clearly is tied to what they eventually call the detective agency.

[22:09] Meg: No, it was always called that because the shampoo. The shampoo that she advertised when she was a model was Blue Moon.

[22:17] Jessica: I'm just saying it's another reference to Blue Moon.

[22:20] Meg: Yeah.

[22:20] Jessica: All all wrapped into the same nonsense.

[22:23] Meg: Yeah, Right. It was sweet. She smiled. She liked it.

[22:26] Jessica: Just like that. I hated. I hated the harmonica. I was just like, really? Who? Bruce. Bruce. Who did you have to convince? Like, ah, this is my opportunity. I'm gonna get my harmonica playing in. This will be my big break for my album. It was so dumb. I'm sorry. I didn't like it. Anyway, they then take this watch because they're like, this watch doesn't even work. It doesn't even have an hour hand. Like, what is this? They go to a pawn shop to figure it out. And did you catch the name.

[22:57] Meg: Yes, I did. The pawn shop was owned by Mr. Dorfman.

[23:02] Jessica: Yes. A name you don't hear frequently.

[23:06] Meg: It's Jessica's last name.

[23:09] Jessica: It's my maiden name. Yeah.

[23:11] Meg: No, that was very exciting. I read it down. Mr. Dorfman. I also wrote down when they ended up in the bar that they were having kamikazes.

[23:19] Jessica: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Yes.

[23:21] Meg: So 80s.

[23:22] Jessica: Like, what could be more 80s than I'm just gonna have a kamikaze shot. Can you whip that up behind the bar?

[23:29] Meg: All right, so back to the **** shop. So the guy opens it up, and there's a series of numbers. What did you think?

[23:35] Jessica: Those series of numbers. I immediately knew that it was longitude number. I knew it was coordinates. It was so obvious a safety.

[23:41] Meg: I thought it was a safety deposit box.

[23:44] Jessica: What I saw was that it was a long string of numbers. And I deduced, well, they're on a bit of a. Of a wild goose chase because we now know that there's diamonds, which has been revealed in some other Nazis, like, soliloquy. And so they have to find it. And so there's this long string of numbers that's a bit tropey. So I was like, okay, they're going to wind up having to find a map.

[24:12] Meg: And if I may say, where they ended up was so outrageously bizarro, they ended up at the top of a clock tower.

[24:21] Jessica: So they follow the coordinates. The make of the watch is the same as the. What's on the building. It was so. It was like they were at the Longines factory or the Bulova factory.

[24:31] Meg: Right, right. And so here's the empire. I could be making that up.

[24:35] Jessica: It's this wildly elaborate art deco building.

[24:38] Meg: With, like, what city are they in, by the way?

[24:41] Jessica: La.

[24:42] Meg: Okay.

[24:43] Jessica: And they decide that because that's where the coordinates lead, and because the watch is missing one of its hands, somehow they decide that the diamonds are gonna be where the hands of the clock are. That this is a jump in logic that is genuinely astonishing.

[25:01] Meg: But again, very similar to the glass elevators. We have to have somebody hanging off one of the hands of a clock, just like in Adventures and Babysitting and.

[25:14] Jessica: Back to the Future and I don't know, Chaplin.

[25:17] Meg: It was actually Harold Lloyd who does the hanging, who did it actually in real life. But yeah. No, it was absolutely, ridiculously absurd.

[25:26] Jessica: Wait, get this. So he keeps trying to climb up this ornate and can't fall. He just keeps falling. And then Maddie's like, I'll do it in heels. So she's going up. And a skirt, and a skirt. And of course he's like, I can see up your skirt. She's going up. She somehow gets onto one of the hands of the clock and is just dangling there now like the elevator chased stationary objects in a chase. This goes on for so long and you're like what the fuck? So after they scale this bullshit with this terracotta open work, she gets up there, he's like wait a minute. Runs inside, there's a ladder, and there's a ladder. And he's like right. And he's like oh, now I'll save you from being on the hand of the clock with the ladder. Which by the way, he has not secured to anything.

[26:21] Meg: He goes up, but somehow it's able to be parallel to the street that's like 20 floors below.

[26:27] Jessica: So he goes up it and then it, right, it tips over. So now it's hanging out over, you know, La Cienega Boulevard. I'm making that up. And it has not been secured on the non dangling side. So it's just there, a piece of metal that all of their weight is on the side that's dangling. There's no counterweight.

[26:54] Meg: It makes absolutely no sense. Also, she's hanging there for so long. I mean at first I was a little panicky because I was like, I. I would have fallen. I would have fallen. I was like, Meg, you would have.

[27:04] Jessica: Fallen like like eight, half an hour ago.

[27:07] Meg: Well, also because none of this physics is not a part of this.

[27:12] Jessica: None of it. What I was thinking when she was on the ladder, he's like, he says very casually, cause she's hanging from it, staring away from the building and he wants her to come to her, he goes, turn around. And I was like, she's doing a hand over hand bent arm hang from a ladder. No one can do that. There's like one kid in grade school who can do that for the Presidential Physical fitness test. One even better though, if I may. All of the scenes where Maddie is doing all of this stuff, it is so clearly a burly man in stockings, heels and an ill fitting suit. No. Oh, oh honey. And a ridiculous wig at the same level of gorgeousness as Crater Face's mohawk. And you can tell because the legs are so thin. And I was like, I have to watch it again. You have to watch it again. I was watching it on my iPad, so I was like nose to screen and I was like, oh, oh man. Like it was a very big stuntman and I was just dying. And every time they had her moving around. That's why she was hanging, not facing him. Because to get down the ladder, it was. It was like, you know, Bob in his outfit, and then Bob turns around and then there's a cutaway, and then it's her on whatever their equivalent of a green screen was hanging from this ladder. So it was so fabulously shoddy. It was so good.

[28:58] Meg: I felt like there was this running thing where I don't know if she called him a pussy.

[29:04] Jessica: She did. She said, you fight like a pussy. Okay, no, no, no. Not a pussy. A sissy.

[29:09] Meg: A sissy. You fight like a sissy. And he has this internal moment where he's you. You know that this is character. I felt like. I knew it was character development. Like, we're gonna find out later on why he doesn't hit with a lot of gusto. And I felt like that was why he couldn't climb up the building because he's, you know, a sissy. Because of. I. I assume it's something about Vietnam, but what do I know?

[29:35] Jessica: He says in the opening, he was not in Vietnam.

[29:37] Meg: Oh, okay, so there's something else going on.

[29:39] Jessica: No, I. I think. I think it was just. They wanted her to be able to punch him as, like, a battle of the sexist thing and be the one.

[29:46] Meg: No, no. I swear to God. There's a moment in the car where he just has this moment where he's like. But there's a reason. I swear it's backstory.

[29:55] Jessica: Well, at least we're gonna find out.

[29:57] Meg: Well, I was sold on that.

[29:57] Jessica: I. I'm gonna keep watching. I love that you were sold. I was. I was all in. Oh, are we gonna keep watching Moonlighting? I think we should. So here's one good thing. Bizarrely, in this hour and a half episode, in the last half hour, Bruce Willis stops being gum, cracking wise, talkin, you know, oyster comparing cootie weirdo, and he actually becomes a person talking to her. And that was the moment where I was like, oh, this guy can act. And there's.

[30:35] Meg: And it's an interesting character. Something's going on there.

[30:38] Jessica: Right? But it's in the last half hour. So I was just kind of like, did they let him finally act? Or, like, what happened to the script? Did someone else take over writing the script? What happened in the writer's room? Why was this allowed to happen?

[30:56] Meg: I mean, really what it came down to. Because you're right. Like, the story is all over the place. And, you know, and actually, I think it started in a good place, and that it ended up in an absurd place with the diamonds and everything, which, by the way, ended up all over the streets of la. So they didn't even successfully solve the case because they didn't have the diamonds in their hands.

[31:18] Jessica: Well, the best, the best thing which we've neglected is that while they're on the clock tower, who shows up but the elderly nazi with his World War II era pistol. And when they find the diamonds, instead of having numbers on the clock, they have like dashes and each one of them is mysteriously made of glass that's easy to break. And her foot goes through one. And then the bag of diamonds with a nazi double headed eagle I did not notice comes out and you're like, okay, I got it. It's the nazi diamonds. And then the guy comes out with his, like, we have ways of making you talk. And. And he's hanging by the bag of diamonds from Bruce Willis. Hand off the ladder. And Bruce is like, I'm gonna save you, nazi guy. And nazi guy has the complete Raiders of the Lost Ark scene where it's like, I can't let go of the nazi gold and of is his undoing. And he falls to La Cienega Boulevard with all the diamonds. Not all of them. I. I went back because I was like, are you guys kidding me? All of the diamonds? No, there were still a few clinking on the other side in the other corner of the.

[32:40] Meg: But we never hear of them again.

[32:41] Jessica: No, of course not. Because that we now know that they won in some mysterious. Maybe someone ran down and collected them off the street as well as what was in the bag.

[32:54] Meg: I mean, one very important thing that we learned from the pilot is that in fact, the Bruce Willis character is not a complete dodo head. That he is good at his job because he does have good instincts. And she has to admit, wow, you're actually really good at this even though you're a sissy. Right? Yeah. Weird. Yeah. And so they're gonna go into business with each other? Why not?

[33:21] Jessica: Yes, exactly. Well, what.

[33:22] Meg: What else? She had to do.

[33:24] Jessica: What else? She's got nothing else.

[33:25] Meg: Any other income, so she might as well. Right?

[33:28] Jessica: Yeah, I guess. Again, like, she's an incredibly famous model. At one point, her lawyer. At the beginning of the show, her lawyer's like, maybe you should get a job modeling. And she's like, I don't wanna. I was like, I don't wanna. Are you nuts?

[33:45] Meg: And isn't he the guy from the A and P commercials? The lawyer.

[33:49] Jessica: The A and P commercial. I recognize that.

[33:51] Meg: Like, grocery stores.

[33:53] Jessica: Really? Yeah. I didn't. I did not put that together.

[33:55] Meg: Yeah, he. He used to do local ads for the A and P. I'm pretty sure.

[34:01] Jessica: Well, that can be checked out. Yeah, it was. It was. The whole setup for the show was all of your money has been lost, but you don't want to do what you've been doing to earn all of that money because you don't wanna. So now you're gonna be hanging off a ladder with **** diamonds with a guy you just called a sissy.

[34:22] Meg: Yeah. Do you think if you had had all of that footage. Because this is what was very, very strange about this pilot.

[34:28] Jessica: I love. I love. You're like, I'm gonna boil it down to the one thing.

[34:34] Meg: All right, I scheduled exactly an hour to prepare for this yesterday. Oh, no, Meg. The pilot was an hour and 20.

[34:44] Jessica: Yeah.

[34:44] Meg: What? That's crazy. And in fact, as I mentioned to you, we had a house guest who's a showrunner this past couple of days, and I asked him this morning, like, 1985, an hour and 20 pilot, so probably two hours. What up with that? And he said, that is weird. That is weird. It's not so weird for now, but it was very weird for then. And then he started thinking about it, like, how famous was Cybill Shepherd at the time? And he was like, nope, Weird. Can't. Can't explain it. All right, so my question for you is, you've got an hour 20 of that footage. Do you think you could have made a better pilot that was, in fact, maybe 45 minutes, which is really what it should have been, plus commercials. It would have been an hour.

[35:34] Jessica: Well, there's a caveat. I want to know what they cut out that were the. Okay, could I have cut what they had? Yes, I could have. I would have made the elevator chase very quick. There is no need for the women to come in and say, Mr. Dorfman, where are you? Like, there are all of these little bits and asides. And, like, how long did he have to cook the knockwurst anyway? Like, that was ridiculous. How long did they need to be running around on the clock tower? They were all. And that's what I. Why I said at the very beginning. The pacing was not only bad, but weird. That to me, it felt like they were trying to fill up an hour and 20 minutes. And I was like, what is this even about?

[36:23] Meg: Really Know what kind of show? Cause it is a pilot. Is it a drama? Is it a comedy? How do we show that it's a comedy. We do this Harold Lloyd thing, you know what I mean? Like, how do we create a romance between the two of them without it, you know, giving too much away? Because Lord knows, like, if we actually have them get together, then we've still.

[36:43] Jessica: All the show is over. You know how they said it? They showed us. It was a comedy. In the first scene where she goes to his office, poor Allyce Beasley is hit over the head with a basketball. And then the wastebasket that he's using falls over her head like something from a Looney Tunes.

[37:03] Meg: I know, I felt bad for her, but that ended up being a great role for her.

[37:08] Jessica: Well, her a thousand per. And if you noticed, she was one of the three top billed people. She was. Which made me wonder what she had done prior. So why was she getting that billing? But what I wanted to know was really, why did this pilot get picked up? What could have made this get picked up? And the only thing that I could think about was, well, the following. The scene we didn't talk about is when he gets the watch off of Maddie. They're dancing. And it was very sexy. They had great chemistry. You could tell it was the first moment where I was like, oh, he is gonna be a sex symbol. I got it. Okay, so there's that scene. I thought that in like that last half hour when they're allowed to act together, they actually have a rapport. And whoever was doing the writing for that last piece got it right. So if they were gonna take a gamble. And this is what I think that she had enough clout. She did have enough clout for someone to decide to relaunch her career with a TV show. And she had a lot of famous friends like she was really hooked in. I think I'm gonna go out on a limb and disagree with Karl. I think that the elements that I just listed made it something that people would pick up. But I think that it's who, you know, she had clout.

[38:41] Meg: Well, I'm certainly glad they did pick it up because I have not seen the show since it aired. I had never seen it in a rerun. And I remember loving this show.

[38:52] Jessica: Oh, it was the best.

[38:53] Meg: So looking forward to it every single week. So we just like, you know, torn it a new one. But it was actually an incredible, incredible show.

[39:02] Jessica: Well, that's why I want to keep watching it, because I do remember loving it. But as so much of like 90% of what we talk about on this show, what did we love as teenagers and how do we see it now? And, you know, I don't know. The one thing I will say, I need to ask you this. When you were watching it the first time around, were you also mystified by her wardrobe?

[39:29] Meg: I. No, not really. I don't remember really paying too much attention to what she was wearing.

[39:35] Jessica: I remember that I was like, this is a really attractive, svelte young woman. She's like 35 years old.

[39:43] Meg: Exactly 35.

[39:44] Jessica: Oh, really? And they have her in the stuff in these like flowy satin suits and heels. The satin suits that they eventually put Bea Arthur in in the Golden Girls.

[39:57] Meg: Like, they're really just bows, the blouses with the bows.

[40:01] Jessica: But yeah, just.

[40:02] Meg: And untucked.

[40:03] Jessica: Yeah, everything is just. She looks big and like they're hiding something. And in the few moments where those costumes like blow in the wind or whatever, you're like, this woman looks amazing. Why, yes, it's the 80s and that was a particular kind of fashion, but it was awful. And the shoes, the shoes always matching the outfit. The gray shoes.

[40:32] Meg: One thing I will say that I do remember from the time was they eventually accused her or there were jokes about Vaseline on the lens, which is ridiculous because I'll tell you, we just watched a pilot. There was zero Vaseline on that lens. And she looks friggin fantastic and not a shocker. First of all, jeans. Second of all, she's only 35 years old. But eventually they start talking about her as though she's ancient, which is ridiculous.

[41:08] Jessica: That's, I think, a great comment, Meg. And the difference between who can make a show now and who can't. And I know that it's fantasy, so it's a different set of rules. But who's that? That enormous tall woman who's in Game of Thrones, who played Brienne of whatever, she's blonde and Gwendolyn something (Gwendoline Christie). Anyway, she would never have had a role ever, ever, ever, in anything ever. Most conventionally beautiful blonde Cybill shepherd was given a hard time. Like, give me a break.

[41:46] Meg: Give me a break.

[41:47] Jessica: Give me a break. So, Meg, I just need to tell you that yet again, I need you to hear from me. This was a stroke of genius. Your decision that we should watch Moonlighting was brilliant. And I am forever indebted to you because you've now opened up a whole new world of ways for me to waste time. Okay? I was like, oh, no, no, this is great for me.

[42:22] Meg: It was enjoyable. It was very enjoyable and I'm very glad we did it. And who knows, maybe I don't want to make any promises because, you know, who knows what the future holds? But maybe we'll do this sort of thing again. We talked about doing something that was like Mystery Science Theater. This is our version of Mystery Science Theater.

[42:41] Jessica: Yeah. Yes. I think this is great. And maybe it's more Moonlighting. Maybe it's a different show.

[42:47] Meg: Maybe so.

[42:49] Jessica: Oh, I just thought of a show.

[42:50] Meg: Why'd you think of Facts of Life? Oh, my God. Watching the pilot of Facts of Life, which had a very different cast, as I recall. Anyway, okay, let's stay on topic.

[42:59] Jessica: Okay?

[43:00] Meg: So, on topic, we are going to take two weeks off. Both Jessica and I have work, travel. Jessica is going to London. I am going to Denver and Tampa.

[43:17] Jessica: So, in any case, I've never heard anyone say Tampa quite that way. That's almost like Matt Berry, you know, like his insane pronunciation. Have you ever been to Tampa?

[43:32] Meg: But we will both be doing busy things outside of New York. But we will reconvene in New York in a couple weeks with another episode. And happy early summer, everybody.

[43:45] Jessica: Yeah, happy, good weather and good spirits.