Daylight Savings Time for TV? (Part 2)

If you haven't read yesterday's post, please do so because I want to get right into it today. I'll give you a few.

OK, here we go. The one hour I would Spring Forward past and thereby eliminate from television history is...

"Moonlighting," originally airing March 31, 1987 as the next-to-last installment in the show's third season. The official title of the episode is "I Am Curious...Maddie," but it is informally known as "The One Where David and Maddie Finally Do It."

This is a famous episode that had tremendous viewership (over 60 million viewers according to a newspaper article cited in Wikipedia), and a long-lasting impact. This was the apex of the hourlong romantic comedy series, and soon after it declined creatively and commercially, struggling to crank episodes out. The conventional wisdom is that this episode torpedoed show by "killing the romantic tension" which made the show great before the lead characters slept together.

Now, we could argue this conventional wisdom. I remember being excited about the episode. ABC was not shy about telling everyone that It was gonna be Done that night in March. It did everything short of taking out a full-page ad proclaiming it. In fact, it was a half-page ad. I sat down with my dad to watch the show (if that sounds awkward, well, I guess it was, but I think mainly because of how it played out), and eventually saw David Addison (Bruce Willis) and Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) get it on.

Now, my memory may be off on this one, and I have not gone back and rewatched this episode, but I recall none of the wit, elegance, and sophistication for which the show is famous today. Instead, as I picture it, the consummation of the relationship was depicted in a blunter manner to dramatize the intensity of the passion between the characters...and probably to have a little fun at the series' own expense and all the "Will they or won't they" discussion. I remember a violent argument followed by a lot of feverish rolling around, crashing into inanimate objects, and a general catastrophic destruction of an entire building. It was a rough session of lovemaking as the lovers left a burning pile of rubble Incredible-Hulk-sized carnage that led to a SWAT team intervention and a HAZMAT cleanup.

At the time, I kind of thought, "Oh, my." It was...different, but I was kind of uncomfortable, and not just because I watched it with my father. It didn't really feel like the show, or at least my ideal vision of "Moonlighting" to that point. Did this scene "kill" the series or perhaps make its death inevitable by taking away that romantic tension the creators had kept going for several years?

Keep in mind the series already suffered from turmoil behind the scenes, as tales circulated of feuds off and on the set between the cast, the cast and the producers, et cetera. It's likely "Moonlighting" was destined to flame out shortly afterwards no matter what happened in that third season, and I don't think the inability to assemble a legitimate full slate of episodes, is attributable to David and Maddie getting it on. Really, were fans turned off by the fact that they had "seen what they wanted" and moved on or by the fact that whole episodes were spotlighting Herbert Viola and Agnes DiPesto?

Also, I believe people think the unfulfilled sensual tension at the heart of the show simmered longer than it actually did. This was the end of the third season, remember, not the result of 5 or 6 years of foreplay. It was the 38th episode of "Moonlighting," meaning David and Maddie had bantered, flirted, and whatnot without having sex for the better part of 37 installments. That's not really a whole lot, is it? Sitcoms used to have 30-some episodes per season back in the day, and even for hourlong dramas of the 1980s, that's like a season and a half or a little more worth of episodes. So while it seemed like "Finally!" because of the hype and because of the machinations the series had gone through to keep the two apart, it really wasn't that long before they gave up and put them together.

The reason I would eliminate "I Am Curious...Maddie" from TV history is because ever since this happened to "Moonlighting," practically every single light drama or comedy with a man and a woman suffers under the momentous burden of the "Will they or won't they" speculation and the assumption that as soon as they will, it inherently ruins the program by taking away what makes it great. There is this perception that a man and a woman on a TV series can't NOT get together eventually, a perception made worse by the simultaneous perception that when they DO get together, the show will be, for all intents and purposes, spent. I reject that premise and wish that more series would learn how to be creative and maintain the tension, or at least find other aspects on which to focus.

Instead, I think of, as examples, "Lois and Clark" and "Ed," romantic comedy/dramas with a light touch and a desperate record of contriving to keep characters who are clearly meant for each other away from each other in an intimate sense. Rather than just tell other kinds of stories, these shows (and others since) go through a kind of hand-wringing about, "Oh, how are we gonna prolong this," so we get straw men/straw women love interests that often end up just wasting our time." Why? Because "Moonlighting" supposedly "proved" you can't get them together. So, hey, if we got rid of that single iconic hour of television on ABC March 31, 1987, maybe  creators wouldn't have that hanging over them. Maybe characters with delightful chemistry could hook up sooner and we could see more stories about loving couples making it work. Or maybe with less pressure, it would be easier to keep the characters apart WITHOUT constant reminders that they are of the opposite sex (or same sex if things get really progressive, but that's a discussion for another day), and you could have more programs with male/female combos portrayed as equals with no inherent expectation they have to sleep together or at least confront the issue at some point.

Oh, I'm sure that even without "I Am Curious...Maddie," the situation would have come up again, maybe even on "Moonlighting" itself, but I would love for this particular TV event NOT to be invoked so often. I think television could well have been much better off without it, not because of the weird execution of the Big Event, or even the Big Event itself, but because of the lessons television people took from it and the gigantic shadow it still casts over the medium today.