About two hundred years ago, there was a li’l show on television called Moonlighting. This show featured the enchantingly beautiful Cybill Shepherd as former model Maddie Hayes, and a handsome newcomer named Bruce Willis as wise ass detective David Addison.

The show was a runaway hit. This show defined how to make an action-packed dramatic comedy. It had it all.

But, like so many shows... it lost its way.

And, I’m certainly not the first to write about this show’s meteoric rise—and subsequent almost-as-meteoric fall. Most Moonlighting fans pin the show’s downfall to that exact moment when Maddie and David broke all the romantic tension of the show and slept with each other.

I do not belong to that camp. The show was failing faster than you can shoot a Bic pen through wood before that.

Others blame the production issues that were occurring shortly before that story line. Scripts were falling behind. There was infighting amongst the cast and crew.

While this certainly attributed to accelerating the show’s decline, I’m not a member of this camp either. In fact, the what killed Moonlighting precedes the production issues, missed deadlines, and the bad blood.

Give me some latitude here, because I’m actually going to call Moonlighting the anti-Apple. Yes, as in Apple Computer. More specifically, the second Steve Jobs era Apple.

Wait, what?

Yes, your humble author is making this obscure connection...

Steve Jobs, after regaining control of Apple, became notorious for giving the customers what they wanted BEFORE they knew they wanted it... to which end, he rarely, rarely accepted feedback in Apple products. How many people suggested an iPod should do this... an iPhone should do that... a computer should never do that?

As Moonlighting began, Glenn Caron did exactly that. He conceived a clever, witty show with rapid fire dialogue that gave audiences what they craved... before they even knew they craved it. Which launched the show into the stratosphere.

But Caron and his writers paid TOO MUCH attention to what people were saying about his show. People loved the instant chemistry between Shepherd’s Maddie and Willis’s David. People loved that David always had a clever comeback to whatever the situation or conversation.

If you rewatch the show now, you can see this happening early in the second season... a little over a year before they fell behind, and nearly two before our heroes shared a bed: the writing changed.

Caron and his writers played up David’s dialogue, taking him over the top. Every time the audience reacted to something David did, the writers took it to the next level... past the point of suspended belief.

They broke the fourth wall, and when that was a hit, they took that over the top too. They wrote themselves into a corner... and as a result, Maddie and David’s romantic chemistry suffered. Watch those season two episodes again and tell me the writers aren’t trying too hard.

Of course, this show was produced in an era where no one imagined mass audiences could watch a show’s entire run again... and long before binge watching was a gleam in anyone’s eye. But if it’s this apparent now, it’s easy to see how faithful viewership was already dropping off during the show’s ascent.

By the time the masses were taking notice, Moonlighting had already lost most of the charm that made it so popular. Sad that so much of the charm was replaced by gimmicks.

Sad, indeed.

And clearly, I’m still spending way too much time inside my head if I can write drivel like this on a sleepless summer night... time to go outside and play.