The Simpsons
America’s Got Talent
Moonlighting
and scores of current and old shows too.
The answer is Hulu. According to Neilsen Online, Hulu is growing faster than Youtube. Granted this is based on only one month’s comparison, but clearly Hulu is doing something right. Oh, by the way Moonlighting was an American television series that first aired on ABC from 1985 to 1989 with a total of 67 episodes. The show starred Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd as private detectives and was a mixture of drama, comedy and romance that is considered a classic spoof of television detective shows. Most filmmakers I know loved the show.
Even the music was special. The show’s theme song was performed by jazz singer Al Jarreau and became a hit. The show is also credited with making Willis a major star while providing Shepherd with a much needed critical success. Unfortunately Hulu has dropped Moonlighting. There is, however, a collection of clips and pilots on YouTube. This site has a great collection of the videos and a good history of the show.
So far no other streaming service has picked it up the Moonlighting series despite pleas from many. The show was innovative in a number of ways.
Breaking the fourth wall
Moonlighting frequently broke the fourth wall, with many episodes including dialogue which made direct references to the scriptwriters, the audience, the network, or the series itself. (For example, when a woman is trying to commit suicide by jumping into a bathtub with a radio, Addison says, “Are you nuts? The network’ll never let you do that, lady!”) This technique had been used previously in shows like such as Burns and Allen and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, but Moonlighting was the first scripted TV series to weave self-referential dialogue directly into the show’s plot.
Fantasy
The series also embraced fantasy. In the second season the show aired “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice”, an episode that featured two lengthy and elaborately produced black and white dream sequences. This was highly unusual in the days of color TV. Why produce a show in black and white while, we have this wonderful color TV? That episode was about a murder that had occurred in the 1940s. David and Maddie are told about by the inheritor of a famous nightclub where the murder had taken place. That’s where the story starts.
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