Creator Glenn Gordon Caron explains how Moonlighting regularly defied expectations.
The Blue Moon Detective Agency is open for business once more!
Or at least, for our viewing pleasure.
Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis on ‘Moonlighting’.Everett Collection
“Part of that was my attitude,” creator Glenn Gordon Caron tells EW.
“I didn’t aspire to be in television.
“I wasn’t smart enough to know what I didn’t know.
Orson Welles on ‘Moonlighting’.Everett Collection
And I didn’t care when they said we have to make them in seven days.
I said, ‘No, they just really have to be good.’
I was admittedly very arrogant, and very ignorant, which is a deadly combination.
Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis on ‘Moonlighting’.Everett Collection
The two bicker about who did it, accusing the other of being sexist.
“It may have been them.
But I said, ‘Let’s do it in two styles of black and white.
Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis on ‘Moonlighting’.Everett Collection
Because to me there was a real difference between MGM black and white and Warner Brothers black and white.
Warner Brothers was much more rough and tumble.
MGM was kind of glossy.
“I told him who I was.
I told him what I wanted to do.
And he said, ‘Send over the pages, and I’ll take a look.’
So I wrote this little monologue for him to introduce the show, and thought that was hysterically funny.
So, he said, ‘Okay, I’ll come over and do it.’
It was very heady, quite frankly.”
It was to be the last on-screen appearance Welles ever made, as he died shortly after filming it.
It becomes such an obsession that she has a dream about their romance and his wife’s infidelity.
“The Billy Joel thing honestly fell over the transom,” remembers Caron.
And I said, ‘what?'”
“I was astounded and really excited because Billy Joel comes from Long Island.
I come from Long Island.
I never met him, but I felt this connection,” he continues.
“The song they sent was ‘Big Man on Mulberry Street.’
It was nine minutes long.
I was like, ‘I’m not quite sure what to do with this.’
But I’d always wanted to do storytelling through dance.
I was always looking for an opportunity to do that.
And I thought, ‘Well, this is the chance.’
So, we built the whole episode around that.”
“I said, ‘Hey, would you come direct this number?’
and he laughed at me,” Caron recounts.
“And I said, ‘What’s so funny?’
He said, ‘Well, what do you pay?’
I said, ‘Well, we’re not paying anything.’
And he said, ‘How many days do I have?’
I said, ‘You probably have to do it in a day.’
And he said, ‘Well, that’s absurd.’
Long story short, I finally convinced him.
We took three days.
Because he was one of my idols.
It was truly one of the highlights of my life.”
“I talked forever about doing an episode in iambic pentameter,” he notes.
That was really part of the DNA of the show.”
“They said, ‘We’ve heard you yak about it all these years.
Let’s just do it.
And let’s do it in pentameter,'” he recalls.
“I laughed and went, ‘Okay, why don’t you?’
They wrote a sensational script, and it’s one of the things I’m proudest of.”
These episodes and all ofMoonlightingis now streaming on Hulu.
