Moonlighting: Bruce Willis’s Breakout Role Finally Available To Buy on Digital

Months after arriving on Hulu — its first-ever streaming release — the beloved TV series Moonlighting is now available for sale on digital video platforms like Apple TV, Prime Video, and Vudu. Earlier today, Disney sent an email burst to fans, encouraging them to buy the series — which starred Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd — digitally for the first time ever. Its introductory price is $59.99, with individual seasons of the show going for between $9.99 and $24.99. The series, which was Willis’s breakout role, ran for five seasons between 1985 and 1989, and the rapport between Willis and Shepherd won over audiences and quickly became TV shorthand.

The series centered on a detective agency owned by Maddie Hayes (Shepherd) and functionally run by David Addison (Willis). It generally had a one-and-done story every week, with a couple of dangling long-term plots going on in the background.

The adversarial semi-romance of David Addison and Maddie Hayes mirrored another TV romance at the time — that of Sam Malone and Diane Chambers on Cheers. Together, they created a mold for the kind of fun give-and-take that would shape dozens of imitators on TV and film going forward.

“When we made Moonlighting, television shows didn’t typically use pop music,” creator Glenn Gordon Caron said recently. “It was really just us and Miami Vice at that time. So when deals were made for the music, no one anticipated streaming. In order to exhibit the show [on streaming], the owner of the shows, which is the Walt Disney Company, has to go back and make deals for all that music – and they’ve resisted doing that for six or seven years now.”

The situation is not uncommon for movies produced in between when Moonlighting and Miami Vice changed the game, and the advent of DVD in 1997. As we discussed earlier today, VHS tapes were not as compact or versatile as DVDs, making home releases of complete TV seasons an expensive rarity. That means home media rights and royalties deals were often never considered during that time.

“With all the attention that Bruce has been getting, hopefully one good thing that might come out of it is we can reinitiate the conversation with Disney about releasing the streaming rights,” Caron said last year. “It’s hard for me to understand why we can’t find a way to make it work. Peacock is now streaming Miami Vice, so clearly somebody has figured it out.”

A book-length oral history on the making of Moonlighting was released in 2021, which shed light on the often-troubled production of the show, and the difficult relationship Willis and Shepherd had behind the scenes for part of its run.