On Sunday, I set my personal record for non-stop viewing of a single show. My wife and I watched the first 13 episodes of Moonlighting, including the two-hour pilot episode, in one stretch. Assuming about 49 minutes of content per hour-long show (down to about 44 minutes, these days) and 93 minutes of content for the pilot episode, we watched Moonlighting for 681 minutes! The extended editions of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, strung together (which I also plan to do someday), clocks-in at 682 minutes. So, this was just practice for a future record-setting attempt.
My purchase of the Moonlighting: Seasons 1 & 2 DVD collection was an unexpected surprise. I took a week off of work earlier this month to get some work done on my track car. One day, while out running errands, I remembered that I had a $10 gift card from Target, left over from my birthday. So, I decided to go to Target and get myself a present. To me, $10 means a DVD, so I spent the next hour perusing DVD titles. After awhile, I came across the Moonlighting set and noticed that it was marked with a ludicrously low price (less than $10.) I couldn’t figure out why the set was marked so low, so I decided to see if it would fly at the checkout. I handed the set over to the clerk and he swiped it across the scanner.
*beep* “$40,” he said.
“Whoa! I’m sorry (now feeling embarassed), but I thought I saw it marked at a lower price,” I said.
“How much?” he asked.
“Seven or eight bucks,” I said.
He indicated that it was no problem and he called over a manager. She used her headset to call for a price check. While we waited, she looked over the box and mentioned that she loved the show. Then the female security officer wandered over and mentioned that she loved the show. Fact: women love Moonlighting. After a minute, the manager started talking into her headset again. She wrote down some numbers and talked to the clerk. Then she turned to me and said, “You are going to love us – it’s priced at $5.99.” Wow! It was obviously a mistake, but they honored it and I got a very nice birthday present.
Does Moonlighting hold up? Do ducks duck? The truth is that Moonlighting never really held-up well in the first place. There were flashes of brilliance for sure, like the film noir flashback episode (famously introduced by Orson Wells only a week prior to his death.) But after watching an extended foot chase scene in one episode in which three characters are disguised in the exact same dress and another scene where an attempted assassination degenerates into a food fight, I was reminded that sometimes Moonlighting was little better than an episode of Scooby-Doo. The difference, of course, was David and Maddie. The charisma and chemistry between these two characters was the blue moon that shown brightly in the black sky of this troubled series. We watch the show to see David’s wisecracking “hip-hop jive talk,” Maddie’s soft-focus glare, and the slow burning embers of a smoldering passion between these two people who only have each other in the whole world. We watch to see these embers being stirred, hissing and popping at one another. Moonlighting isn’t about rhyming receptionists or an exceptional Motown soundtrack. It’s about a man and a woman – nothing else. And in this case, that is good enough.
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