Will they, won’t they? Dream sequences and virtual consummation in the series Moonlighting

Abstract

The 1980s series Moonlighting was one of the first dramedies on the small screen; it took its cue from venerable genres like the screwball comedy or the hard-boiled novel (particularly The Thin Man) and translated them to television’s changing structures and aesthetics, participating in what has been termed the second Golden Age of television. However, the Nick and Norah Charles of Moonlighting, David and Maddie, were not married: on the contrary, the series was largely fuelled by the tension between the two leads, who were constantly sparring but were seemingly drawn to one another. Though this romantic tension has long been a staple of the silver screen, translating it into weekly episodes was more complicated—like its sitcom counterpart Cheers, also airing at the time, the writers struggled to maintain the central tension without creating undue frustration for the viewer. Moonlighting chose a particularly novel solution: the dream sequence. While David and Maddie continued to spar in “real/reel” life, the series offered regular dream sequences where they consummated their relationship either as themselves or as others. These dream sequences allowed for aesthetic and narrative innovation while maintaining thematic continuity: David and Maddie appear in dance sequences, in film noir, in The Taming of the Shrew, where they become the couple that the series keeps postponing. More than consummation, then, the series offers the performance of that consummation, voluntarily coded in different genres and styles, to the extent that the brief period where the two characters were a couple within the diegesis was met with general disappointment from fans and creators alike. This article explores the way that the series plays with genre, style, and viewer expectations in these different dream sequences.