They just met on the way . . .

With the ongoing writers' strike, David and I (like many others I am sure) have started digging into our TV on DVD collection. This week we started watching Season 1 of Moonlighting. During the late 80s this was one of my absolute favorite TV shows, along with others in the sexual tension, witty banter, mystery-solving, will-they-or-won't-they genre of the time such as Remington Steele and Scarecrow & Mrs. King.

Like other TV on DVDs I've made David watch with me (Buffy, Angel, Roswell, Alias) I'm hoping to convert him to fandom. I also hope I can figure out why these kind of shows appealed to me when I was a "tween". Maybe it was because these women were a kind of nascent form of the strong and complex female characters I would later love (such as Buffy and Sydney Bristow). What role did Maddie Hays and Laura Holt play in the development of my personal brand of feminism? Maybe adult me can find this out.

There's also the pure comedy of Moonlighting that I always loved. I can't wait to watch the Taming of the Shrew parody, and the one where everyone dresses up like the client with the black veil over her disfigured face. The end involved lots of cream pies. Classic. I didn't realize this, but Moonlighting is often cited as one of the first modern dramadies (fusing aspects of comedy and drama), now a staple of the contemporary TV diet. The show also routinely broke the fourth wall, a practice which points to the artistic complxity of the show. As Leah R. Vande Berg's entry on Moonlighting at the Museum of Broadcast Communications argues:

"Additionally, in many episodes, protagonists Maddie and David break the theatrical "fourth wall" convention with self-reflexive references to themselves as actors in a television program or to the commercial nature of the television medium. Such metatextual practices are techniques of defamiliarization which, according to certain formalist critical theories, epitomize the experience and purpose of art; they jar viewers out of the complacent, narcotizing pleasure of familiar forms and invite them to question and appreciate the artistic possibilities and limitations of generic forms. Moonlighting's use of these metatextual practices signifies its recognition of the traditions that have shaped it and its self-conscious comments on its departure from those traditions -- characteristics typically attributed to works regarded as highly artistic."

Moonlighting as highly artistic, eh? And I just thought it was fun to watch.