One fact of life I still struggle with is that no matter how well something ages, its true age will be visible if you look hard enough. I’m mostly talking about my face here, as even though I’m a feminist, I’m still incredibly vain. But the same axiom can be applied to many things like our favorite TV shows, or Prince William.
Moonlighting came to Hulu last year, the release for which we had all been clamoring for years. And in many ways it did not disappoint. The dialogue is a fugue that sizzles with both sex and humor, allowing Bruce Willis to display the charm and comic delivery that would make him a star. But often not discussed is how Cybill Shepherd more than holds her own against such a powerhouse, giving as good as she gets and doing the deft job of playing the straighter emotions that are arguably harder: smart, sensible, disappointed. Over the years Shepherd’s biography seems to jump from model-girlfriend of director Peter Bogdanovitch, to mom on Lifetime movies, her time on Moonlighting reduced to a joke about “The Maddie Haze” – the ultra-soft focus employed when filming her. My own childhood memory of People Magazines from that era seemed to always blame her being “difficult” for the show’s scheduling issues. In almost all discussions her actual talent and performance are overlooked and dismissed.
The show itself was cutting-edge for breaking the format and then breaking it again, in a handful of episodes that were talked about for decades. And truly hats off to the writers who took those chances, and the producers and executives who let them. It’s an incredible feat, one we should all be so lucky to achieve in our passions. One of these ground-breaking episodes is the nod to noir thrillers, The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice, in which both Maddie and David imagine how a historical case played out from their own perspectives. It features the legendary Orson Welles at the beginning, urging people not to adjust their TVs for what they were about to see. This was 1985, Kids. We were watching the avant-garde on network TV.
As David and Maddie drive away from the scene of the decades old murder - a love triangle gone wrong - they are each blaming the opposite sex for it. David believes it was a femme fatale who convinced a good man to do wrong while Maddie believes a woman got coerced by a conniving man. And then this exchange ensues.
DAVID: You look at everything like a woman first and then a person second. You don’t look at a situation objectively. You don’t look at a situation like an individual.
MADDIE: For your information I think of myself as an individual first and a woman second, in that order.
Inherent in this argument is that men look at a situation objectively. Because men are people. The default factory setting for human beings is for males and their perspectives. Men are “individuals.” Women are not.
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