Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) is a former model best known for being the Blue Moon Shampoo girl. She wakes up one morning to find all her money stolen by her crooked accountant Ron Sawyer. All she has left are various money-losing businesses used as tax losses. One of them is City of Angels Detective Agency run by smart alack David Addison (Bruce Willis). She closes him down. He is trying to convince her to keep the agency open when a dangerous murder case literally falls into her lap. She relents as he renames it, the Blue Moon Detective Agency. She is desperate to make her business profitable but he is more concerned about gaining media notoriety. Agnes DiPesto (Allyce Beasley) is the wacky rhyming receptionist. Temp worker Herbert Quentin Viola (Curtis Armstrong) joins the team in the third season.
The banter between Maddie and David is electric rapid-fire. She would call it "conversational harikari". It is irreverent. They have segments breaking down the 4th wall. They often reference themselves as a real TV show. It is tongue in cheek. Breakout star Bruce Willis is at his Bruno best. Cybill and Bruce have the perfect rom-com banter. The will-they-won't-they is a lot of fun. I laughed harder in the second season than almost anything else ever on TV. It is the best until late in the third season.
The consummation of their relationship is often blamed for the show's decline. It's rather simplistic. The problems go much deeper. The show gets darker and their relationship gets more melodramatic. The fourth season starts with Maddie running home to Chicago and revealing her pregnancy. The humor is lost especially since the two are separated. It's an attempt to work around a couple of things; Cybill Shepherd's real life pregnancy, and Bruce Willis' fledgling movie career. As great as the first two plus years, the fourth year is notable for its missteps. It's a warning for TV writers everywhere. The show nosedived and never recovered. Compounding the problem are two additional moves in an attempt to return the show back to its first position. Maddie's quickie marriage and their baby's death are the last straws. This show climbed quickly and plummeted catastrophically. While it was good, it was an audience favorite.
The banter between Maddie and David is electric rapid-fire. She would call it "conversational harikari". It is irreverent. They have segments breaking down the 4th wall. They often reference themselves as a real TV show. It is tongue in cheek. Breakout star Bruce Willis is at his Bruno best. Cybill and Bruce have the perfect rom-com banter. The will-they-won't-they is a lot of fun. I laughed harder in the second season than almost anything else ever on TV. It is the best until late in the third season.
The consummation of their relationship is often blamed for the show's decline. It's rather simplistic. The problems go much deeper. The show gets darker and their relationship gets more melodramatic. The fourth season starts with Maddie running home to Chicago and revealing her pregnancy. The humor is lost especially since the two are separated. It's an attempt to work around a couple of things; Cybill Shepherd's real life pregnancy, and Bruce Willis' fledgling movie career. As great as the first two plus years, the fourth year is notable for its missteps. It's a warning for TV writers everywhere. The show nosedived and never recovered. Compounding the problem are two additional moves in an attempt to return the show back to its first position. Maddie's quickie marriage and their baby's death are the last straws. This show climbed quickly and plummeted catastrophically. While it was good, it was an audience favorite.