SnoopyStyle Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) is a former model best known for being the Blue Moon Shampoo girl. She wakes up one morning to find all her money stolen by her crooked accountant Ron Sawyer. All she has left are various money-losing businesses used as tax losses. One of them is City of Angels Detective Agency run by smart alack David Addison (Bruce Willis). She closes him down. He is trying to convince her to keep the agency open when a dangerous murder case literally falls into her lap. She relents as he renames it, the Blue Moon Detective Agency. She is desperate to make her business profitable but he is more concerned about gaining media notoriety. Agnes DiPesto (Allyce Beasley) is the wacky rhyming receptionist. Temp worker Herbert Quentin Viola (Curtis Armstrong) joins the team in the third season.The banter between Maddie and David is electric rapid-fire. She would call it "conversational harikari". It is irreverent. They have segments breaking down the 4th wall. They often reference themselves as a real TV show. It is tongue in cheek. Breakout star Bruce Willis is at his Bruno best. Cybill and Bruce have the perfect rom-com banter. The will-they-won't-they is a lot of fun. I laughed harder in the second season than almost anything else ever on TV. It is the best until late in the third season.The consummation of their relationship is often blamed for the show's decline. It's rather simplistic. The problems go much deeper. The show gets darker and their relationship gets more melodramatic. The fourth season starts with Maddie running home to Chicago and revealing her pregnancy. The humor is lost especially since the two are separated. It's an attempt to work around a couple of things; Cybill Shepherd's real life pregnancy, and Bruce Willis' fledgling movie career. As great as the first two plus years, the fourth year is notable for its missteps. It's a warning for TV writers everywhere. The show nosedived and never recovered. Compounding the problem are two additional moves in an attempt to return the show back to its first position. Maddie's quickie marriage and their baby's death are the last straws. This show climbed quickly and plummeted catastrophically. While it was good, it was an audience favorite.

TILLIER When re-watching the series, it has all of what the 80's where about. A brilliant soundtrack: the temptations, rolling stones, ray Charles, Mitch Ryder, James brown,... Sexual innuendos, gender parity clashes. The actors from the times were also relevant: Whoopi Goldberg, Terry O'Quinn, Judd Nelson, Brooke Adams, and what about having an intro from Orson Welles and Eva Marie-Saint as Maddie's mother. The references to "old Hollywood" are excellent: Harold Loyd, a bit of Shakespeare and musicals. Each episode introduces different kind of creativity: the animated paste that will be later used in Celebrity deathmatch, the reference to John Landis type of comedy, the references to the horror movies of the time (chainsaw massacre, mike myers, exorcist, poltergeist, etc...). The dialogs are excellent and the second part which had lower audience at the time (series 4 and 5) are actually more appreciable now. It is like a concentrated package of all what was the 80's about into a 5-season TV series.

cmw3755 My spouse gave me the DVD set for Christmas. I had forgotten how absolutely funny the program was in its earlier seasons. The yin-yang / push-pull banter between the two main characters was just hilarious and meticulously timed. The DVD set was well packaged with a good amount of commentary regarding the pilot with sensitive interviews with the stars. Seasons 1 & 2 were so special because of the tension between the two and the friendship that was nurtured without going to the bedroom. Even though the show is over 20 years old, it still seems fresh and full of laughs. Mr. Willis and Ms. Shepard were the best choice for this series

possumopossum Let me tell you the sad story of an innovative TV show that had a lot of promise. It featured one of the hottest blonde bombshells of the time and it launched her male lead into eventual stardom. It was an off-the-wall show about two unlikely people becoming reluctant partners in a detective agency that is about to go bankrupt because former model Madelyn Hayes's (sexy Cybill Shephard) accountant took her money and ran. This show was different, in that you didn't know whether it was supposed to be a romantic comedy or a detective show. It turned out being both. It was off-the-wall with some of the cases they took and with these inside jokes they did. The charm of this show was that it looked like something you would see in a MAD magazine.(My personal favorite: "You can't barge in there like that!" ADDISON: Oh, no? Tell that to the script writers.By the way, WHAT SCRIPT WRITERS? One reason for the show's demise, I think, was that people got tired of waiting for the script writers to come up with something new. They kept showing the same two episodes a season over and over. This was a show with a lot of promise and because of infighting among the cast and crew and lazy script writers, it crashed. The few scripts that did come out were great, very innovative, and different. Two people learning how to be detectives on the fly was a pretty good idea. Just when you thought they knew what they were doing, they would screw up. This stuff was hilarious, and the stories kept your interest as well. A shame such a great show suffered such a sad fate because the people involved with it didn't know what to do with it.