Moonlighting-Season Five

The creative collapse of Moonlighting after bickering coworkers David Addison (Bruce Willis) and Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) became a couple is so thoroughly established in TV lore, the series’s impressive return to form in its brief final season has almost been forgotten (a paucity of reruns certainly hasn’t helped matters). The episode that gets things started, “A Womb with a View,” is a veritable catalog of trademark Moonlighting devices (musical numbers, repeated violation of the fourth wall), plus a onetime humdinger—Willis playing Maddie’s in utero son—that, against all odds, results in one of the most daring and sincerely moving hours of 1980s American television. The other 12 episodes don’t all measure up, but examples of dazzling creativity abound straight through to the head-spinningly metafictional grand finale (featuring Dr. Timothy Leary as himself). — Andrew Johnston