More Moonlighting babble
Jan. 14th, 2007 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieYeah, I know nobody cares about a TV series that's twenty years old, but I just finished the season three set, and I gotta babble about something in particular that bugs me.
So. Maddie. David. It. The Big Bang.
I don't really mind that she slaps him twice before they wind up investigating each other's tonsils. I mean, she's slapped him, sucker-punched him, and otherwise decked him several times in the past, and if I was going to care, I'd have cared by now. It's just that their fight seems so scripted, like the writers just said, "Well, the only way they'd ever actually give in to their attraction would be after a fight ratchets up the tension so badly that they snap," when in fact, given the events of the previous three episodes, that's not actually true.
I mean, here's David, who's been convinced by a woman in a jail cell (don't ask) to go and finally tell Maddie he loves her. He goes to her house to do just that, only to find the door opened by an "old friend," Mark freakin' Harmon. (Yes, that Mark Harmon. Yes, they did make his character, Sam, an astronaut. Yes, they did go for the easy joke by having David nickname him "Luke.")
He scurries away, his self-confidence and resolve going down like the Hindenberg. He then tries to sabotage Maddie&Sam, goes two rounds with Sam in a parking garage (at that point, if I were Maddie, I would've told them both to go to hell and never had contact with either of them again for the rest of my life, but that is neither here nor there), and goes a bit crazy at hearing that Sam asked Maddie to marry him.
(Aside here: there's a truly unnecessary scene where Sam goes to David's apartment and basically says he's not good enough for Maddie. It makes Sam look like a real ass, and really, the whole thing worked much better when the audience had to face that he appeared to be a solidly good guy. This scene seems to exist merely because the writers weren't quite sure that they'd gotten everyone on the Dave&Maddie train over the preceding two and a half years, which...dude. If someone wasn't rooting for them yet, chances are they never would be.)
So when Sam leaves, and David shows up wanting to talk, and Maddie (thinking he's Sam--another long story) tells him she loves him, WHY won't he say anything? He's there expressly to talk! Having just heard her big speech about loving him, he has nothing to lose! And yet he says he doesn't have to say anything? What? I can see why Maddie is pissed off. He did the same thing earlier in the episode, in her office, where she begged him to say something and he didn't. The man has no reason not to talk, and yet he doesn't; apparently, just so the writers can manufacture tension in order to have the Big Fight.
I dunno. It bothers me. The fact that out of the four episodes, only "Maddie's Turn to Cry" is actually funny, bothers me. I sped through large sections of "Blonde on Blonde" and "Sam and Dave" because whoa, unfunny. On the bright side, these four episodes gave Agnes and Burt time to shine as comic relief. Usually, they're kind of annoying, but since the main characters were being so serious, they were actually welcome in these eps. Agnes as Maddie's drinking buddy was hilarious. ("Wanna go get bombed? You know, splashed? Plastered? All the boy detectives do it!")
That said, "To Heiress Human," the "morning after" episode and finale for the season, is very good. Well...pretty good. Better, anyway. The blatant manipulation both Maddie and David do to each other irritates the hell out of me (I want to do Very Bad Things to anyone who makes a character I normally like do the "If you love me, you'll do this" thing, because ARGH), but it's logical. These people? They're good at that, at least where the other is concerned. It's never really been shown in such detail, but yeah, this rings true. And the way the case mirrors what's going on in their (non-)relationship is excellent; really, truly excellent. The way they keep breaking the pact to forget what happened because they can't keep their hands off each other is perfectly in character. The car rolling backwards at the end is cheesy, yeah, but then again, the whole show can be cheesy on occasion, and it is kinda funny.
So, not a bad place to end. I'm certainly not taking another tour through the hell that is the fourth and fifth seasons. Once during the reruns in high school was plenty, thanks.
And here's where I vacillate about whether "the Moonlighting fallacy" is actually a fallacy or not. The optimistic part of me says, the show didn't die a painful death because Maddie and David resolved their UST. It was all due to Cybill Shepherd getting pregnant, Bruce Willis going off to make movies, and the big writers' strike that season. If all three of these things hadn't happened in the same few months, season four would've been awesome. The root of the problem was that they couldn't get these two characters in scenes together; that's what the show was based on, and even if they hadn't consummated their relationship right beforehand, the show still would've crashed and burned because of this.
The larger,pessimistic realistic part says that one has to face the fact that these two people could never have a long-term relationship. Not even in the magic of TV Land. Not without partial lobotomies, anyway. As a viewer, I want so, so badly for it work, but it won't. It is Doomed with a capital D, and if it keeps on, we have to see one of two things: David and Maddie compromising so much that they turn into entirely different people, thus eliminating the sparky, opposites-attract quality that makes their relationship so attractive in the first place, or an atomic bomb-level implosion of the relationship. Neither of those things are particularly attractive prospects.
Of course, what we ended up with was the worst of both worlds: a long separation of the characters, crazy decisions by time-strapped writers, and disintegration of the relationship into angry bitterness. Some shows can thrive on a bitter relationship. This show? This show was built on attraction, on whether the heart would win out over the head (or possibly the loins over the visceral disgust), and bitterness really has no place in it.
I have a big "Everyone should watch the 'Atomic Shakespeare' episode, even if you've never heard of this show!!!1!!1!!eleventy!!!" post coming up, as soon as I round up some YouTube links. Stay tuned.
So. Maddie. David. It. The Big Bang.
I don't really mind that she slaps him twice before they wind up investigating each other's tonsils. I mean, she's slapped him, sucker-punched him, and otherwise decked him several times in the past, and if I was going to care, I'd have cared by now. It's just that their fight seems so scripted, like the writers just said, "Well, the only way they'd ever actually give in to their attraction would be after a fight ratchets up the tension so badly that they snap," when in fact, given the events of the previous three episodes, that's not actually true.
I mean, here's David, who's been convinced by a woman in a jail cell (don't ask) to go and finally tell Maddie he loves her. He goes to her house to do just that, only to find the door opened by an "old friend," Mark freakin' Harmon. (Yes, that Mark Harmon. Yes, they did make his character, Sam, an astronaut. Yes, they did go for the easy joke by having David nickname him "Luke.")
He scurries away, his self-confidence and resolve going down like the Hindenberg. He then tries to sabotage Maddie&Sam, goes two rounds with Sam in a parking garage (at that point, if I were Maddie, I would've told them both to go to hell and never had contact with either of them again for the rest of my life, but that is neither here nor there), and goes a bit crazy at hearing that Sam asked Maddie to marry him.
(Aside here: there's a truly unnecessary scene where Sam goes to David's apartment and basically says he's not good enough for Maddie. It makes Sam look like a real ass, and really, the whole thing worked much better when the audience had to face that he appeared to be a solidly good guy. This scene seems to exist merely because the writers weren't quite sure that they'd gotten everyone on the Dave&Maddie train over the preceding two and a half years, which...dude. If someone wasn't rooting for them yet, chances are they never would be.)
So when Sam leaves, and David shows up wanting to talk, and Maddie (thinking he's Sam--another long story) tells him she loves him, WHY won't he say anything? He's there expressly to talk! Having just heard her big speech about loving him, he has nothing to lose! And yet he says he doesn't have to say anything? What? I can see why Maddie is pissed off. He did the same thing earlier in the episode, in her office, where she begged him to say something and he didn't. The man has no reason not to talk, and yet he doesn't; apparently, just so the writers can manufacture tension in order to have the Big Fight.
I dunno. It bothers me. The fact that out of the four episodes, only "Maddie's Turn to Cry" is actually funny, bothers me. I sped through large sections of "Blonde on Blonde" and "Sam and Dave" because whoa, unfunny. On the bright side, these four episodes gave Agnes and Burt time to shine as comic relief. Usually, they're kind of annoying, but since the main characters were being so serious, they were actually welcome in these eps. Agnes as Maddie's drinking buddy was hilarious. ("Wanna go get bombed? You know, splashed? Plastered? All the boy detectives do it!")
That said, "To Heiress Human," the "morning after" episode and finale for the season, is very good. Well...pretty good. Better, anyway. The blatant manipulation both Maddie and David do to each other irritates the hell out of me (I want to do Very Bad Things to anyone who makes a character I normally like do the "If you love me, you'll do this" thing, because ARGH), but it's logical. These people? They're good at that, at least where the other is concerned. It's never really been shown in such detail, but yeah, this rings true. And the way the case mirrors what's going on in their (non-)relationship is excellent; really, truly excellent. The way they keep breaking the pact to forget what happened because they can't keep their hands off each other is perfectly in character. The car rolling backwards at the end is cheesy, yeah, but then again, the whole show can be cheesy on occasion, and it is kinda funny.
So, not a bad place to end. I'm certainly not taking another tour through the hell that is the fourth and fifth seasons. Once during the reruns in high school was plenty, thanks.
And here's where I vacillate about whether "the Moonlighting fallacy" is actually a fallacy or not. The optimistic part of me says, the show didn't die a painful death because Maddie and David resolved their UST. It was all due to Cybill Shepherd getting pregnant, Bruce Willis going off to make movies, and the big writers' strike that season. If all three of these things hadn't happened in the same few months, season four would've been awesome. The root of the problem was that they couldn't get these two characters in scenes together; that's what the show was based on, and even if they hadn't consummated their relationship right beforehand, the show still would've crashed and burned because of this.
The larger,
Of course, what we ended up with was the worst of both worlds: a long separation of the characters, crazy decisions by time-strapped writers, and disintegration of the relationship into angry bitterness. Some shows can thrive on a bitter relationship. This show? This show was built on attraction, on whether the heart would win out over the head (or possibly the loins over the visceral disgust), and bitterness really has no place in it.
I have a big "Everyone should watch the 'Atomic Shakespeare' episode, even if you've never heard of this show!!!1!!1!!eleventy!!!" post coming up, as soon as I round up some YouTube links. Stay tuned.
