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8/10
A GREAT MYSTERY TO RESOLVE
asalerno107 July 2022
After his wife is killed in a car accident, a man sinks into such depression that he hires a hitman to stage his own assassination. Until one day he thinks he sees his wife alive on the street. He goes to the agency convinced that his wife did not really die and orders David and Maddie to try to find her and at the same time stop the person who the same contract to kill him. An interesting episode, with a lot of mystery, highly entertaining and with an unpredictable ending. Here we begin to see the protagonists in hilarious scenes speaking directly to the public.
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Seeds of its destruction
aramis-112-80488019 November 2023
A distraught fellow hires a hit man to kill him then changes his mind. But how does he contact the hit people? Try the Blue Moon detective agency!

Not a new idea (it had also been the subject of a Graham Chapman comedy, for instance). But this is a pretty good iteration of the idea.

The problem was the "Moonlighting" ambiance. I'd been a fan of the show since the pilot and even enjoyed their breaking the fourth wall and becoming self-referential. But I was in my early 20s and moved in artsy territory and loved what they did.

These days a little of that stuff still works but it's overused in this episode, especially when David cues the chase. And when they "do" "Star Wars" (including the music) they seem to be repeating some of the worst excesses of some 1970s James Bond movies.

I suppose most TV shows that run for a long time become spoofs of themselves but "Moonlighting" took the short cut and headed itself off at the pass. The show would become too self-referential, speak too much to the audience. And then it got too-too after Willis became the bigger star but only got second billing; and Cybil forgot that period when she was box office poison.

As I say, those cute little tricks weren't new to "Moonlighting" but they started being too prominent here. I've been on both sides of this issue. One was when I was young and ate this sort of silliness with a spoon; and now, in my 60s, thinking, say, "Remington Steele" was the better show (and one I watch more often) because it didn't take that road. I've been in both camps and I'm tolerant of both but what I don't enjoy about "Moonlighting" and part of why the show imploded starts in a big way here.
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