That’s the one! That’s the one I mentioned up-thread that spooked me as a kid. Brilliant. It seems it’s pretty hard to get on DVD now - I’m going to have to stalk Amazon Marketplace…
I don’t know; if you didn’t like it then you probably still won’t, as it may now seem even more of a curiosity with the eighties outfits etc. But the writing is superb. Apparently Shepherd was a nightmare to work with and was forever complaining about the scripts, which were 50% longer than normal TV scripts because of the fast-paced dialogue. Although there are a good few episodes that stick out in my mind, it’s hard to say how they would stand up alone as I am only partway into the second series at the moment, and there are five seasons. I wouldn’t like to recommend something from memories that are over twenty years old! If my memory serves, it really took off towards the middle of the second series and then into the third series. The last season - where Shepherd was pregnant, Willis had become McClane and they both really hated each other - was poor. As for the postmodernism… It starts off as a traditional detective series, but with exceptional writing in terms of dialogue. The writers didn’t care for plot much, though - they resolve one early episode with a pie fight and another with Willis throwing the bad guy’s money over the balcony in a mall, at which the bad guy just stops trying to kill them - go figure. And by later series they just had someone from the props department step into frame and remove the gun from the bad guy’s hand. Because as the show went on, it started to “break the fourth wall” more and more. This started off as being fun - the stars reading viewers’ letters out before the credits, the occasional quip about the network in-show, or the great episode where a kid is sent to do his Shakespeare homework instead of watch Moonlighting and imagines the whole plot of The Taming of the Shrew as starring the Moonlighting cast. But I remember getting more and more fed up with the postmodern episodes, and feeling really cheated by the last episode, in which the set is taken down around them and they chase through the studio asking for a reprieve. I’m curious as to whether I will find that more entertaining now, and whether it was just that as a teenager I expected my stories to take themselves more seriously.
Anyway, we somehow seem to have veered off into this thread:
