[1] Starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis as private detectives, Allyce Beasley as their quirky receptionist, and Curtis Armstrong as a temporary worker (and later junior detective), the show was a mixture of drama, comedy, mystery, and romance, and was considered to be one of the first successful and influential examples of comedy drama, or "dramedy", emerging as a distinct television genre.

[7] The series revolved around cases investigated by the Blue Moon Detective Agency and its two partners, Madelyn "Maddie" Hayes (Shepherd) and David Addison (Willis).

The show, with a mix of mystery, sharp dialogue, and sexual tension between its leads, introduced Willis to the world and brought Shepherd back into the spotlight after a nearly decade-long absence.

The show's storyline begins with the reversal of fortune of Maddie Hayes, a former model who finds herself bankrupt after her accountant steals all her liquid assets.

She is left with several failing businesses formerly maintained as tax writeoffs, one of which is the City of Angels Detective Agency, helmed by the carefree David Addison.

In his audio commentary for the season-three DVD, creator Glenn Gordon Caron says that the inspiration for the series was a production of The Taming of the Shrew he saw in Central Park starring Meryl Streep and Raúl Julia.

[8] The series was created by Glenn Gordon Caron, one of the producers of the similar Remington Steele, when he was approached by ABC executive Lewis H. Erlicht.

Erlicht liked the work Caron had done on Taxi and Remington Steele and wanted a detective show featuring a major star in a leading role who would appeal to an upscale audience.

The show made use of fast-paced, overlapping dialogue between the two leads, harking back to classic screwball comedy films such as those of director Howard Hawks.

[2] Moonlighting frequently broke the fourth wall, with many episodes including dialogue that made direct references to the scriptwriters, the audience, the network, or the series itself.

Cold opens sometimes featured Shepherd and Willis (in character as Maddie Hayes and David Addison), other actors, viewers, or TV critics directly addressing the audience about the show's production itself.

"Atomic Shakespeare" features the cast performing a variation of The Taming of the Shrew, with David in the role of Petruchio, Maddie as Katharina, Agnes as Bianca, and Herbert as Lucentio.

The episode features Shakespearean costumes and mixed the plot with humorous anachronisms and variations on Moonlighting's own running gags.

Although Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers did not appear in the episode, Lionel Stander reprised his role as the Harts' assistant Max.

The episode "Big Man on Mulberry Street" centers around a production dance number set to the Billy Joel song of the same name.

Moonlighting was unusual at the time for being one of only three shows, due to FCC regulations limiting the practice, to be owned and produced in-house by a broadcast network (NBC's Punky Brewster and CBS's Twilight Zone revival being the others).

To capture the cinematic feel of the films of the 1940s, for example, he would prohibit the use of a zoom lens, opting instead to use more time-consuming master cameras that move back and forth on a track and require constant resetting of the lights.

Finnerman then went on to be the director of photography for the TV series Star Trek and was responsible for creating much of the mood in that show by employing black-and-white lighting techniques for color film.

This background meshed perfectly with what Caron was trying to portray in the series, and earned him an Emmy nomination for the black-and-white episode "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice".

[15] Typical scripts for an average one-hour television show run 60 pages, but those for Moonlighting were nearly twice as long because of the fast-talking, overlapping dialogue of the main characters.

"[17] All of this attention to detail resulted in production delays and the show became notorious for airing reruns when new episodes had not been completed in time for broadcast.

The series lost Glenn Gordon Caron as executive producer and head writer when he left the show over difficulties with the production: I don't think Cybill understood how hard the workload was going to be.

[24] The move failed to rekindle the sparks between the main characters or capture the interest of the audience, which led to an even further ratings decline.

The March to August 1988 Writers Guild of America strike[25] canceled plans for the 1987–1988 Moonlighting season finale to be filmed and aired on TV in three dimensions in a deal with Coca-Cola, and delayed the broadcast of the first new episode until December 6, 1988.

The characters then race through the studio lot in search of a television producer named Cy, as the world of Moonlighting is slowly dismantled.

As the show had not produced enough episodes to gain a syndication contract, following its original run, it was not widely seen until its DVD release, although it occasionally appeared on cable channels targeting women (including Lifetime and Bravo in the US, and W in Canada) in the 1990s and 2000s.

[32] In September 2023, it was announced that all 67 episodes of the series, remastered in high definition, would be made available on Disney's streaming service Hulu starting October 10 that same year.

[34] Riptide, a once-popular detective series whose ratings had declined to the point of cancellation after airing against Moonlighting in the 1985–1986 television season, aired an episode (the show's penultimate) in 1986, in which that show's detectives acted as mentors to "Rosalind Grant" (Annette McCarthy) and "Cary Russell" (H. Richard Greene), the bickering stars of a television detective-show pilot.

[35] The series even spawned a pornographic parody entitled Moonlusting in 1987, directed by Henri Pachard and starring Taija Rae as Hattie Mays and Jerry Butler as David Madison, together running the New Poon Detective Agency.

The show was also parodied on an episode of The Chipmunks titled "Dreamlighting" in 1988 with Alvin's character named "Alvinson" based on David Addison.