Fans of the Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd series Moonlighting were given a surprise this week when series creator Glenn Caron revealed that all five seasons of the show are soon heading to streaming for the first time. The 1980s series has been absent from any streaming platform despite fans hoping that Moonlighting would arriving on some platform or other and now it looks like the work to make that happen has started according to Caron’s recent Twitter post.
Moonlighting is a comedy drama series that debuted on ABC in 1985, and saw Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, in one of the biggest early roles, playing a pair of private investigators. As well as being credited with making a star of Willis and giving Shepherd’s career a much-needed boost, Moonlighting is also one of the first successful entries in the comedy-drama genre on TV. The series ran for five seasons until ending in 1989 after 67 episodes.
While there have been home media released of Moonlighting, the series has never made it to streaming, but that is now going to change. In his Twitter post, Caron said, “CAT’s OUTTA THE BAG. Can’t keep it under my hat any longer - - the business of getting all 5 seasons of “Moonlighting” starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd ready for streaming has begun. It's an ambitious project. Lots of moving parts. And it could take quite a while. But I wanted you to be the first to know.”
Moonlighting Has Been Caught Up In Music Rights Issues.
Fans of Moonlighting have been questioning why the series has not appeared online before now, and Caron recently explained that there have rights issues stopping the series being put out on a streaming platform. Like everything now, if there is music involved in a TV show or movie everyone wants a bit more money from streaming rights, and that’s something that wasn’t even a thing when Moonlighting first hit screens. Caron told EW:
"When we made Moonlighting, television shows didn't typically use pop music. It was really just us and Miami Vice at that time. So when deals were made for the music, no one anticipated streaming. In order to exhibit the show [on streaming], the owner of the shows, which is the Walt Disney Company, has to go back and make deals for all that music – and they've resisted doing that for six or seven years now. With all the attention that Bruce has been getting, hopefully one good thing that might come out of it is we can reinitiate the conversation with Disney about releasing the streaming rights. It's hard for me to understand why we can't find a way to make it work. Peacock is now streaming Miami Vice, so clearly somebody has figured it out."
Of course this is not the first time Disney have had to spend a little time securing music rights to be able to put an older series online, as they had similar issues with the many musical tracks on The Muppet Show, which led to some episodes being added later and others being omitted entirely. As Caron says, it is not a quick process, which means that Moonlighting’s arrival on streaming is not imminent but is certainly now on the horizon.