Moonlighting and streaming have long been strangers, but not for much longer: ABC’s iconic Cybill Shepherd–Bruce Willis 1980s detective dramedy will finally go digital next month, Vulture has learned. Hulu will add all five seasons and 67 episodes of creator Glenn Gordon Caron’s series to its lineup on October 10, marking the first time the show has ever been legally available to stream on any platform. Appropriately enough, the show’s Hulu premiere date falls on a Tuesday, the same night the show aired on ABC for almost its entire 1985–1989 run.
News of Moonlighting’s digital debut comes almost exactly one year after Caron informed fans that he had finally convinced Disney — whose now-defunct ABC Circle Films production company produced the show — to invest the time and money needed to begin making the show ready for streaming. In addition to remastering the show from film to HD video, Caron and Disney needed to go through the arduous process of securing the digital rights to the many pop-music songs used in the show, as well as to the late Al Jarreau’s Grammy-nominated theme song, which was released as a single in 1987 and cracked Billboard’s top-30 Pop chart. That delay was worth it. The theme and most of the other songs originally used on the show have been cleared for streaming, a Hulu source tells Vulture. Still to be determined: whether the show will stream on Disney+ outside the U.S. or if it’ll be licensed to other streaming platforms internationally.
In case you’ve never seen it — quite likely if you’re under the age of 35 — Moonlighting starred Shepherd as a model who ends up running a detective agency and a then mostly unknown Willis as her partner, with Allyce Beasley and Curtis Armstrong as their offbeat employees. In addition to the regular use of pop standards, the series was packed with dialogue (scripts ran three times longer than was standard at the time for hour-long shows), and characters would often break the fourth wall to talk directly to audiences.
Moonlighting was a massive ratings success for a big chunk of its five-year run on ABC. It was a success out of the gate when it debuted in mid-season spring 1985, and then climbed into Nielsen’s top ten during its first full season (1985–86.) It stayed in the top 20 through season four, but faded fast during its fifth season after ABC moved the show opposite CBS’s still-hot Murder, She Wrote Sunday nights at 8 p.m. It wasn’t just network scheduling that hurt the show, however. Between Shepherd and Willis’s reported on-set clashes and Caron’s desire to spend the time and money needed to elevate the show above production, norms of the time led to episodes often not being ready in time and to reports of budget overages. In an extra on the DVD release of Moonlighting, the creator made no apologies for making premium television for a broadcast network. “Why should all TV shows cost the same?†he said in the featurette. Of course, just a decade later, the golden age of HBO and other cable dramas followed by the streaming revolution would prove Caron right, as networks rushed to make TV shows feel more like movies.