Wait, Tubi has Moonlighting now??

I am more and more amazed that the streaming service Tubi has a plethora of television shows available for casual FAST watching. FAST being free advert-supported television.

Yesterday, just on a whim, I figured I’d try a show that I never really got into during its original 1980’s broadcast run. That show was the screwball comedy / drama Moonlighting, the show that revitalized Cybill Shepherd’s career and launched the career of Bruce Willis.

You know. This show.

I will say that for the longest time, trying to find Moonlighting on any viewing platform was difficult at best. The DVD box sets of the series are long out of print, and the show wasn’t available on Netflix or Hulu or anywhere else. You could purchase entire seasons with Amazon Prime, but that was about it.

And then … here it was, all the episodes.

Okay. I started to watch the first one. I wanted to see what turned this program into a ratings juggernaut for the few seasons it existed.

And … well … I think I can see why, but I also think that the episodes on Tubi may have a bit of an issue.

See, when Moonlighting first aired, the program used a lot of popular and contemporary music in each episode. And before the series could be prepared for a streaming platform, those music rights needed renegotiation – or, in some cases, songs had to be outright replaced. And you can HEAR the tonal quality of the generic replacement music in the Tubi broadcasts. It sounds completely jarring, like someone interspersed some schlock catalog music over what was supposed to be a carefully crafted and composed scene.

This is not unusual by any means. Try to find Miami Vice on a streaming platform. Or the 1960’s period drama American Dreams. Or Murphy Brown, who also used a ton of licensed tracks. Heck, WKRP in Cincinnati had WHOLE EPISODES re-recorded and re-dubbed because of music rights and licensing.

And so it must be with Moonlighting. I’ll try to accept the banter and fourth-wall-breaking fun of the dialogue and camera work and acting for the series, but man oh man, I really wish there was a way to see the episodes in their original format without resorting to illegally downloading the series from some sketchy website, or by paying drug-dealer prices for an out-of-print DVD boxed set.

Such is life, I guess … 😀