‘Moonlighting’ creator, Cybill Shepherd on ‘brilliant’ Bruce Willis: We ‘fought’ for him

nypost.com:

Hulu in its streaming debut, 34 years after its final fadeout.“We tried to get the show on Disney+ when it was first announced and when the Hulu situation developed we explored that,” series creator Glenn Gordon Caron told The Post. “About a year ago my agent reached out to Hulu and that really got the ball rolling.

It’s taken years for us to get the resources together and it was a big effort and I’m extraordinarily grateful.”“Moonlighting,” in which Shepherd and Willis played quirky private detectives Madolyn “Maddie” Hayes (a former fashion model) and David Addison Jr., premiered in March 1985 as a midseason replacement — but, as viewers soon discovered, it was anything but a “burnoff” series.

Inspired by the screwball comedy movies of Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, “Moonlighting” shattered primetime conventions with its noir-ish texture, breaking of the “fourth wall” (characters speaking directly to the viewers … very meta), lengthy soliloquies and rapid-fire dialogue (among many other taboo-busting elements).

The chemistry between Shepherd and Willis was obvious from the get-go and it paid off handsomely: “Moonlighting” rocketed a previously unknown Willis into stardom (pre-“Die Hard”) and confirmed Shepherd’s star power in her first-ever regular series role after a string of hit movies in the 1970s (“The Last Picture Show,” “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Taxi Driver”).Allyce Beasley played rhyming receptionist Agnes DiPesto and Curtis Armstrong played her love interest, Herbert Viola.When it signed off in May 1989 after 67 episodes (all available on Hulu), “Moonlighting” had amassed 41 Emmy nominations (including Shepherd and Beasley) and a 1987 statuette for Willis.