The "Moonlighting Curse" Curse (and the surprisingly easy way to avoid it)

Moonlighting’s Dave (Bruce Willis) and Maddie (Cybill Shepherd)

On March 3, 1985, a show called Moonlighting premiered on ABC. It starred Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd as Dave and Maddie, private detectives who ran a detective agency called Blue Moon Investigations. The show was a trailblazer – it represents the first notable example of the tv genre that has come to be known as “dramady” (a portmanteau of “drama” and “comedy”), it featured fast-paced and overlapping dialogue reminiscent of screwball comedies from decades past, utilized elements of fantasy (such as dream sequences and a Shakespearean alternate universe), and broke the fourth wall often and innovatively. For two and a half years, Moonlighting remained one of the best shows on television and received many award nominations.

And then, in an episode entitled “I Am Curious… Maddie,” Dave and Maddie resolved two and a half seasons’ worth of sexual tension. After that episode, the series experienced a rapid decline in ratings and was cancelled after the fourth season. In the ensuing years, conventional wisdom blamed the series’ decline on the fact that Dave and Maddie had hooked up. With the question “will they or won’t they?” answered, people said, the audience lost interest in the show. Getting the characters together had effectively killed the show. Thus, “the Moonlighting Curse” was born – don’t let your main characters hook up, because if you do it will kill your show.

But you see, telling the story the way I have above doesn’t tell the whole story. Maddie and Dave’s ill-fated hookup was followed by a series of increasingly terrible narrative choices, the result of which was that suddenly Moonlighting wasn’t Moonlighting anymore. They wrote in Shepherd’s pregnancy, but then had a musical episode in which the audience meets Dave and Maddie’s baby (in utero) and is told that Dave and Maddie’s relationship is so terrible that everyone – including the baby – should be grateful that Maddie miscarries. Dave lands in prison – in solitary confinement no less – because of a case of mistaken identity. An incredibly awkward love triangle ensues – and if any love story involving a character played by Mark Harmon (especially 80s!Mark Harmon) is awkward, you know the writing’s bad. Instead of witty dialogue, pop culture references, and screwball comedy, audiences tuning in to Moonlighting were treated to overwrought melodrama. Maddie and Dave could have become the Nick and Nora of the 80s, but instead they cursed tv couples into languishing in romantic limbo for the next decade.

Even Moonlighting’s creator, Glenn Gordon Caron, has admitted that the show’s issues stemmed from behind-the-scenes troubles rather than the simple plot point of Maddie and Dave hooking up. “The show was really difficult to do,” he told the Chicago Tribune back in 2005. Timeliness was a constant problem – so much so that scripts came in late enough that episodes were often delayed, and the audience would tune in expecting a new episode only to be greeted by a rerun. Ask Damon Lindelof and Carleton Cuse, co-showrunners of Lost, how the audience feels about irregular new episode/rerun schedules. (Hint: not good. “IsLostARepeat.com” was a website that existed starting at some point during the show’s third season. To this day you only have to type “is lost a r” to get Google to suggest “is lost a repeat.”) There were also scheduling difficulties and rumors that Shepherd and Willis disliked each other, neither situation being conducive to playing an effective couple. Given the background, then, it isn’t surprising that Moonlighting was losing viewers and isn’t unreasonable to suggest that said losses had very little to do with the simple fact that the unresolved sexual tension (commonly referred to in fandom circles simply as “UST”) between Dave and Maddie had been resolved.

Unfortunately, television writers and showrunners only paid attention to thefirst part of the story and didn’t take into account all the additional factors that went into the demise of Moonlighting. In the ensuing years, countless television writing teams have performed extraordinary (or perhaps extraordinarily bad) narrative acrobatics in order to drag out any and all UST long beyond reason.

Thus, in my opinion, the “Moonlighting Curse” Curse was born. The results of its destructive power can be found across genre and network lines throughout the years between Moonlighting’s demise and today.

They were totally gonna kiss… and then she got stung by a bee that infected her with an alien virus. (The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully)

Take The X-Files, for example. Whilst in my opinion this is one of the milder examples of the Curse in action, there’s still no arguing that it by the time the first movie happened, it was starting to get a little ridiculous that Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) hadn’t hooked up. They connected from the very beginning of their relationship, and even if they hadn’t been pushing it prior to Scully’s cancer arc, the show stopped having a prayer of convincing most viewers that Mulder wasn’t in love with Scully when he wept at her bedside. The interrupted-by-bee-sting almost-kiss in the first movie made such an impact on TXF fans that I dimly recall hearing about it at the time, despite the fact that in 1998 (when the movie was released) I was not only not in fandom at all let alone in TXF fandom, I wasn’t even living in the United States. In the last few years I’ve worked my way through all nine seasons of the show and both movies. Whilst I found the way they orchestrated the Mulder/Scully relationship to be frustrating and occasionally ridiculous, it was rendered somewhat less annoying by the fact that Chris Carter – creator and showrunner of TXF – mostly like to pretend that Mulder and Scully weren’t in love at all, as opposed to constantly throwing them together and pulling them apart. Duchovny’s much-reduced presence – explained away by Mulder being abducted and then being on the run – in the last two seasons of the show probably actually helped the writers stretch out the Mulder/Scully story without it being too ridiculous. That being said, they were still skating the line and didn’t always keep themselves from falling over it. Just because TXF managed to succumb to the Curse without it negatively affecting the quality of the show doesn’t mean that any show can.

There is not enough space in this caption to explain the narrative acrobatics that kept these two apart. (Alias’ Sydney and Vaughn)

One show that went to outlandish lengths to split up their will-they/won’t-they couple was JJ Abrams’ Alias, which starred Jennifer Garner as super-spy Sydney Bristow and Michael Vartan as her handler/fellow spy Michael Vaughn. Throughout the show’s first season and the first half of the second season, Sydney and Vaughn shared a simmering chemistry and fell in love. After having literally one of the best first-kisses in tv history (in this author’s humble opinion) and spending half a season together, the Moonlighting Curse Curse struck with a vengeance. Sydney passes out after a knock-down, drag-out fight and wakes up in Hong Kong with no memory of how she got there. Vaughn meets her, and then he tells her that she’s been assumed dead for two years and reveals that he’s wearing a wedding ring. But wait, there’s more! Vaughn’s wife turns out to be evil, everyone finds out, Syd and Vaughn get back together. It happens slowly and, due to episodes being aired out of order, kind of awkwardly, but surely they’d stick together this time, right? Oh, my sweet summer child. Vaughn “dies,” Sydney has his baby, Vaughn is suddenly not dead anymore but he’s in hiding, Vaughn is reunited with someone who isn’t Syd but looks like her, and then finally Syd and Vaughn are actually reunited a couple episodes before the end of the series. Only with the series’ end could Sydney and Vaughn actually stay together without extremely contrived blocks.

Scrubs dragged out the JD/Elliot storyline even though viewers didn’t seem to be losing interest in Turk and Carla as their relationship progressed naturally through dating, engagement, marriage, and parenthood. We all know what happened to Ross and Rachel on Friends. Short-lived sci-fi show Dark Angel had one half of their UST couple be infected with a virus that would kill the other half if the two ever so much as touched. (I mean, really.) Teen shows Roswell and Veronica Mars weren’t immune from the Curse either. It’s positively epidemic.

When you do a Google Images search for “the Moonlighting Curse,” this is the first image that pops up.

Two current shows that get mentioned in nearly every article or blog post written about the Moonlighting Curse (or the Curse of the Moonlighting Curse, like this post) are FOX’s Bones and ABC’s Castle. Of late, many of those articles and posts have spoken about these shows as if they beat the Moonlighting Curse, due to the fact that Bones got their leads together after six seasons and Castle did it after four. I have to respectfully disagree. Whilst the shows haven’t died in the aftermath of resolving the UST, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t suffer at the hands of the Curse.

Bones, in fact, allowed the Curse to detrimentally affect not just one but two of their couples. And then they only hooked up the leads (Emily Deschanel’s Temperance Brennan and David Boreanaz’s Seeley Booth) because Deschanel got pregnant and if they were going to write in the pregnancy instead of trying to hide it, there was no way they could get away with the baby being anyone but Booth’s. I still watch Bones, but it often feels more like a chore than a pleasure, and many of the characters, particularly Brennan, have become caricatures rather than characters.

The writers on Castle kept writing season-long character arcs for Nathan Fillion’s Richard Castle and Stana Katic’s Kate Beckett that seemed to be leading to an end-of-season confession of feelings from one or the other, only to press a big red reset button of doom in each season’s final episode so that whichever character was psyching themselves up for a Big Declaration would be presented with a reason not to carry out their plans. The most egregious example of this was how at the end of season three, Beckett got shot and Castle declared himself to her just before she slipped into unconsciousness. In the season four opener, she told him she didn’t remember anything after she got shot, but it was revealed to the audience that she remembered everything. They spent the rest of season doing yet another childish and increasingly out-of-character dance around each other. It was only in the season four finale that they finally put on their big kid panties and dealt with their feelings. Now, in the fifth season, they’re dating, but trying to keep it from Beckett’s boss, so it’s not entirely out in the open.

It’s in Bones and Castle that we find the main reason why I think the Moonlighting Curse Curse is so damaging. I am a very character-driven viewer. It isn’t just the plot that’s affected when UST is dragged out beyond reason – the characters suffer even more than the plot does. Booth and Brennan, Castle and Beckett, these are characters who are presented as healthy, intelligent, sexually active adults who are largely aware of their own feelings. After a while, it becomes completely unbelievable that at least one of them hasn’t said something. Even worse, the writers will set up long character arcs, such as Brennan learning over the course of multiple seasons to be in touch with her emotions instead of being a detatched scientist all the time, which they must then backtrack on. Brennan started off as a highly intelligent scientist who understood emotions in theory but generally thought herself above the irrational urges they often lead to. She grew into a still-highly intelligent scientist who not only understood emotions in theory but was pretty in touch with her own. Then she backslid into being someone who was only highly intelligent where facts were concerned but had absolutely no freaking clue about anything remotely emotional or intangible, which was frankly terrible to watch. It’s not quality entertainment, and at the end of the day it even leaves viewers (or at least, it left me) wondering if we even wanted the UST couples to get together after all.

Okay, you might say, all that just shows that you can’t be sloppy or lazy when you keep your characters apart. It doesn’t mean that getting characters together won’t still kill your show even if you do it well. I’d argue the fact that the preceeding sentence contains the phrase “you do it well” indicates that there’s a reasonably good chance that it won’t kill your show, but hey. I’ll humor you.

This was actually real! They actually got married! Before the end of the series! (Chuck’s Chuck and Sarah)

Exhibit A: NBC’s Chuck

Chuck, NBC’s geek-turned-spy action-comedy, debuted in September 2007. Over the first two and a half seasons, lead characters Chuck and Sarah fake-dated, developed feelings for each other even though they shouldn’t, kissed because they thought they were about to die, kissed because they wanted to but then decided they couldn’t be together, and checked plenty of tropes off the Standard UST Plot Points list. Halfway through the third season, however, they realised that they weren’t going to stop loving each other just because they weren’t together, so it was stupid for them to pretend that they weren’t in love with each other. So they actually got together, and they never looked back.

By mid-season four, Chuck and Sarah were engaged, and they were married in the season four finale. Then they spent all of season five, you know, married. There was some brain-wiping chicanery at the end of the series, but that wasn’t intended to actually break them up. Rather, it was used to underscore that no matter what, Chuck and Sarah love each other and are meant to spend the rest of their lives together.

The best thing about the show, however, was that all of the characters and relationships on the show were treated with that same respect. Chuck’s sister started out the series engaged, and over the course of five seasons, she and her fiance got married, had a baby, and just generally stayed happy and together. Chuck’s best friend had a couple of relationships that evolved in realistic ways. Everyone stayed in character, everyone made decisions that jived with their ongoing motivation. People grew and moved forward and it was delightful.

Also noteworthy: the reason Chuck had five seasons at all was that it had incredibly strong fan support. When it looked like the show was going to be cancelled after the second season, fans organized a campaign to convince NBC to renew the show. The campaign targeted one of the show’s sponsors, the Subway restaurant chain. As a result of the campaign, NBC struck a major deal with Subway that helped cover costs of the third season. Each subsequent renewal was never a sure thing, and so each year fans made sure to campaign for the show’s renewal. Without fan support, Chuck would have been cancelled. Had the show not maintained its high level of quality, the fan support that kept it alive would surely have disappeared.

Both relationships have progressed entirely suitably for the characterization of all involved. (Leverage’s Nate/Sophie and Parker/Hardison)

Exhibit B: TNT’s Leverage

Basic cable network TNT’s heist dramady series Leverage is about a motley crew of thieves and hustlers who band together to act as modern-day Robin Hoods, righting wrongs and using their unique skills to make sure that dishonest and powerful people are forced to pay for their misdeeds. The show is tightly-plotted, the dialogue is witty, and they regularly reference Doctor Who, which gives them a whole bunch of points in my book. But in my opinion the best thing about Leverage by far is the way that it’s really all about the characters and about how this disparate collection of people comes together and what they come to mean for each other.

As such, it comes as no surprise that they have deftly handed not one but two slow-build relationships, proving that not only is it possible to get together characters who have UST, it’s also possible to make the UST last without it being unbelievable or detrimental to the characters. One of the couples, Nate and Sophie, have a previous romantic history that informed their path to romantic reunion. The other pair of characters, Parker and Hardison, had not met prior to the beginning of the series but have slowly and surely grown closer. The best part is that through it all, all the characters have grown and changed and done so in ways that both come from within and as a result of the fact that they’re helping each other to grow.

Basically the way that the writers of Leverage handle character/characterisation and the continuing development of the relationships between characters is BEAUTIFUL and if you haven’t been watching this show, you should do yourself a favor and pick it up. I promise you won’t regret it, and you will see an excellent example of why the idea of there being a Moonlighting Curse is patently ridiculous.

The roadblocks in their relationship were logical, understandable, and not longer than they needed to be. (Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt)

Exhibit C: NBC’s Parks and Recreation

Parks and Recreation, an NBC comedy that uses the same mockumentary style as fellow NBC staple The Office, is another show that pays a lot of attention to writing strong characters who remain in-character while also growing and progressing.

Ben and Leslie’s initial UST-dance was endearingly awkward and took an amount of time that felt natural as opposed to being too long. The roadblocks that pulled them apart after they initially got together were ones that made sense both plot-wise and character-wise. That is to say, the plot points themselves did not come out of left field but rather felt organic to the world whilst the characters reacted to the plot points in ways that made sense given their histories. The time it took them to get back together in spite of the reasons they initially decided to break up likewise felt natural and organic to the show and to the characters.

The show also subverted the convention of pulling apart formerly-unresolved couples by having Ben take a (temporary) job halfway across the country from Leslie whilst not actually having them end the relationship, not be tempted to cheat on each other, and end up stronger than ever upon being reunited once Ben returned to Pawnee, the small Indiana town in which the show is set.

They literally could not touch each other, yet they were in a romantic relationship for essentially the entire run of the show. (Pushing Daisies’ Ned and Chuck)

Exhibit D: ABC’s Pushing Daisies

First, I have to get the obligatory “this show should never have been cancelled ever” declaration out of the way, because THIS SHOW SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN CANCELLED EVER. It had the misfortune of debuting in 2007 and therefore having its freshman season cut short by the Writers’ Strike, and then the following year, for reasons unfathomable to those of us who were actually watching the show, ABC chose not to give this quirky gem time to build its audience. It was cancelled after an abbreviated second season, and there was wailing and rending of garments across the internet.

Secondly, I have to explain that this show was pretty much a master class in magical realism, so when I say that Ned (charmingly played by Lee Pace) had the power to wake the dead with a touch and that if he didn’t touch them again within one minute they’d stay alive but something else (of roughly equivalent size/complexity) would die and that even if he waits more than a minute to touch them they’ll still drop dead again with a second touch and that when you watch the show you completely believe that is plausible, you’ll just have to take my word for it. Ned uses this unique ability to help a private investigator (hilariously played by Chi McBride) solve murders – it’s easy to solve the case when the victim can actually tell you who did it. Chuck (short for Charlotte, played by Anna Friel) is Ned’s childhood sweetheart. She is murdered, and when Ned wakes her in the course of investigating, he doesn’t re-deadify her.

Ned and Chuck literally cannot touch each other for the entire run of the series, yet they don’t waste time angsting over that fact. Instead, Ned wears bells on his slippers so they won’t bump into each other accidentally in the morning. They kiss through plastic wrap. They install a plastic curtain with an enclosed sleeve in between the driver’s and passenger seats in Ned’s car so that they can hold hands there. In the wintertime, they take advantage of the fact that they’re wearing gloves and walk hand-in-hand.

There are a lot of truly fantastic things about Pushing Daisies, but the way they just completely subvert the whole Moonlighting Curse/UST paradigm is quite possibly my favorite thing about that show. That, or Lee Pace’s face. It’s a toss-up.

One of the few examples of an unresolved will-they/won’t-they that actually mostly works, despite how long it’s gone on. (NCIS’ Tony and Ziva)

Exhibit E: Outliers

Sometimes a show manages to stretch out UST far longer than you’d think would be possible without actually compromising the integrity of the characters or the narrative. It’s rare, though. Off the top of my head, there are a couple examples I can think of, but both are special cases.

The first is CBS’s long-running crime procedural NCIS. Since the third season (and they’re now in the tenth), the characters Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) and Ziva David (Cote de Pablo) have thrown sparks off each other. If you ask me, they’ve been in love with each other for years. Yet they have never hooked up – at least not on screen. I think the reason why they work is that they’re both very damaged characters who don’t find it easy to be emotionally open or vulnerable. Additionally, they’ve had other relationships, and their non-romantic relationships with other characters are also often featured, so the UST between the two of them has never been the only emotional storyline for either of them. Sure, it’s beginning to get frustrating to watch them gaze adoringly at each other when the other isn’t looking and exchange loaded stares when they are but for there to never be on-screen payoff, but I just end up half-heartedly and good-naturedly shaking my fist at the screen as opposed to actually getting upset. The point is, the writing is always true to the characters and I have never felt like either of them has made a decision regarding their relationship that came out of the blue.

Since they couldn’t have a romantic relationship, the writers instead gave them a deep friendship and the occasional alternate universe where they could be romantically involved. (Stargate SG-1′s Jack O’Neill and Sam Carter)

The other is sci-fi drama Stargate SG-1′s Colonel Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson at his dry sarcastic best) and Major Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping). Because both characters were in the Air Force, which has strict rules about fraternization, and especially because Jack was Sam’s immediate superior, there were never any plans to purposefully insert romantic tension or imply that there was some kind of illicit relationship going on. The actors had excellent chemistry, however, and instead of ignoring that the writers chose to make use of it in a few ways. (I should note here that I have only gotten through the third season so far, so I’m basing all this on what I’ve seen and on the vague spoilers I have come across regarding the other seven seasons.)

First and foremost, they allowed Jack and Sam to share a strong bond of friendship and deep respect. They weren’t romantically involved, but they obviously cared about each other a whole heck of a lot

Secondly, they also took advantage of the sci-fi aspect of the show and, on more than one occasion, allowed glimpses into parallel universes in which Sam had chosen not to join the Air Force and therefore when the two of them met, there was no reason for them to not have romantic interest in each other. The original versions of Jack and Sam generally seemed more surprised by the fact that parallel!Sam wasn’t in the Air Force than they were that their parallel doppelgangers were together.

The common thread in these two cases is, essentially, that the writers don’t seem to be messing with their audience by teasing them with UST just for the sake of teasing them. The narrative choices that they make regarding the couples’ relationship statuses serve the overall events of the show and the charaters themselves.

To put it simply: the “surprisingly easy” way to avoid the Moonlighting Curse Curse that I promised in the title of this post? It’s just to write your plot in such a way as to remain true to the characters while allowing them to progress and grow. Audiences are not as dumb as networks seem to believe we are. We want characters that we can care about, stories that mean something. We want to see story arcs that resolve and close and don’t get reset because the writers are scared to think outside the box they’ve been sitting in since 1989.

The only cursed thing about the Moonlighting Curse is that people believe it exists.