Yes, it’s October, and for many that means Spooky Season. We are all flooding our streaming services looking for upcoming Horror movies to terrify us beyond belief. But something else landed on streaming this month, and it’s scary good. The classic television series Moonlighting, which features Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd as wise-cracking detectives, has finally made its way to Hulu after not being on streaming for decades. And while Willis’s current wife Emma Hemming celebrated the news on social media, there are other reasons why longtime fans of the series can celebrate this new option to stream.
Moonlighting basically introduced the world to Bruce Willis, as the up-and-coming actor stole scene after scene from Cybill Shepherd until the two figured out how to maximize their chemistry, turning the show into a sexy “Will they or won’t they?” debate similar to the Sam and Diane one that powered Cheers for years. With Moonlighting reaching Hulu, Willis’s wife posted the following to Instagram, giving us this exquisite look at Willis in his prime:
We all share her excitement for Moonlighting making its way to Hulu. But it’s not like the show has been locked in a vault, away from prying eyes. There were ways to watch the 1985 detective comedy. Just, not in its entirety. There was a DVD set of Moonlighting made available (though it’s currently out of print), and bootleg copies of episodes and seasons could be found on YouTube, in terrible video quality. And purists know that some footage from key episodes was missing… that since has been reinstated for the Hulu stream.
Indiewire does a solid breakdown of the repairs made to damaged Moonlighting footage before it went to Hulu, which included the inclusion of hilarious cold open sequences featuring a bantering Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, introducing the show to audience members and breaking down the fourth wall in ways that TV shows just didn’t. The way that Mike DeKalb, distribution operations manager, catalog TV mastering at The Walt Disney Company describes this new presentation of Moonlighting:
This is like a Rosetta Stone. This is something that people have been waiting for years.
We have needed good news on the Bruce Willis front. His Moonlighting creator Glenn Gordon Caron gave fans a recent update on the actor’s health, confirming that he’s currently “not totally verbal,” thanks to the aphasia diagnosis Willis currently is battling. Emma Hemming has been using her social media to keep Willis fans up to date on his ongoing struggles, and it only hurts more when we see Willis in his prime in Moonlighting, which relied so heavily on his precision and timing with wordplay. We might not ever get that again, but Hulu now lets us revisit the golden age whenever we want.