Moonlighting Complete Series is it possible?

[Thomas Crown]

Originally Posted by questrider

I am absolutely loving my revisit of this series for the first time since it aired and am nearly finished with season two. Usually when binge watching a series I skip the main titles and end credits but with Moonlighting I can't help but watch them both each and every time because of the nostalgia involved with the theme song. (And maybe because my memory of the original broadcasts is that an announcer would talk over the end credits so it was rarely enjoyed with the song intact.) Nothing is sweeter than that refrain at the end when Jarreau croons "Who just met on the way!"

Thanks for posting the video. I don't think that I've ever seen it before. I know a soundtrack featuring some of the songs from the series was released many years ago on CD but wouldn't mind if they released some of the score music from the show too.

Moonlighting is a classic IMO and holds up really well especially the first 3 seasons. The rapid fire dialogue is simply insane at times that you have no choice but to do a re-watch because there are so many funny one liners and innuendos flying at you that you have to go back to catch them all.

[jra166]

There are only two shows remaining that I must have in 1080p. Moonlighting is one of those two. Even if I had to buy it on iTunes or Amazon, that would suffice for me. I just hope at some point it is available. (FYI, the other is Dallas)

[Blu Tears]

In my humble opinion, seasons 1-3 of Moonlighting were (and still are) among the greatest in the history of television and top my wish list for Blu-ray. Then came seasons 4-5, which (for many reasons, some beyond the producers' control) were a slow, agonizing insult to everything that had come before.

I HIGHLY recommend seeking out the earlier seasons and following the series up through "I Am Curious... Maddie" (season 3's penultimate episode).

Then... STOP RIGHT THERE and finish things off with this... http://moonlightingbttf.com/

Going this route will save you MUCH heartache.

[razorwire]

It would be nice if Sony or Lionsgate would release this soon. I would also love to have all the teasers / bumpers / trailers included. Some commentaries would be awesome

[Captain N]

Come on, Sony, Image, Kino, Shout - anyone? Bring this to bluray. I (re)discovered the lovely Cybill Shepherd in Special Delivery, and am now eying this series, but see my only option is oop dvds. Would love them on bluray.

[dunkrag]

Thankfully got the full set of R1 dvds of this but would love a BD set... it would look gorgeous surely being shot on 35mm with those old style cinema lenses on Shepherd too.

If there an HD version of this anywhere? It’s conspicuously absent from iTunes and Netflix..are there rights issues with it?

While we are at it - where is Cybil’s Heartbreak Kid on home video? - can’t find that anywhere either...

[disco1979]

I would love this to be on Blu-Ray. This year is the 35th anniversary so it's a shame we didn't get a deluxe set.

The pilot is one of the best TV pilots in my opinion because it feels like an actual movie it's so well done. The chemistry between Shepherd and Willis is off the charts, and it had such great writing, visual style and music.

[AmishParadise]

I went back recently updating my profiles for this TV series in DVD Profiler adding episode guides for each season. For fun I decided to work up all the episode images myself mirroring what was used for the DVD menus just as I recently did with the Battlestar Galactica: The Definitive Collection release. They turned out great I think. To view my online profile for each season just click on the given URL provided below. The images below show what the TV series looks like from My Movies for Windows Media Center. There's nothing like browsing one's Blu-ray collection at 150" diagonal.

Moonlighting: The Complete Seasons One To Five


Moonlighting: The Complete Seasons One and Two


Moonlighting: Season Three


Moonlighting: Season Four


Moonlighting: Season Five


(The episode image I used for Season 1, Episode 5 'Next Stop Murder' is the only one that doesn't match what the DVD used. I couldn't for the life of me find the same frame shown in the DVD menu. I suspect the moment pictured never made it into the episode.)

[James Luckard]

ABC produced Moonlighting in-house. It was exceptionally rare at that time for a network to own a show they broadcast. They talk about this a fair amount on the DVD extras. Because showrunner Glenn Gordon Caron didn't have layers of bureaucracy, he said was able to get away with a lot more, and make expensive artistic choices that wouldn't have been possible otherwise, from what I remember.

However, with only 66 episodes, the show never came close to the 100 episodes needed for syndication, so it didn't have the afterlife ABC had hoped for. It did run a few times first on Lifetime and then on Bravo, around 1999, when I videotaped every single episode. I remember they aired each episode at 7pm and again at 2am, and for 66 consecutive weekdays, I made sure I was home for one of those airings to tape each one without commercials.

The pilot was licensed from Disney by Anchor Bay in 2000. They did a DVD with commentary by Caron and Willis. Anchor Bay promised to license a few more episodes, including Atomic Shakespeare, to do a "Best Of" DVD, but then they announced that the DVD was cancelled because the song licensing had proved prohibitively expensive.



Finally, in 2005, Lionsgate (back when it was still Lions Gate) licensed the entire series for DVD from Disney because TV on DVD was huge then. It was exceedingly expensive to re-license all the songs, but they managed to do it. I don't know of any song replacements in the entire run of the show, except for the accidentally switched underscore in "The Lady in the Iron Mask," which was never corrected.

The Lions Gate DVDs are long, long OOP. Since ABC owned the show, it's a Disney property. They don't seem to have any interest in putting catalog TV shows onto BD, or in licensing them anymore either.

I have a feeling the best we can hope for is that, at some point, they remaster it in HD for streaming, once they decide if Hulu is really going to be their grown-up streaming service, since this clearly won't ever run on Disney+.

[beamish13]

Originally Posted by Blu Tears

In my humble opinion, seasons 1-3 of Moonlighting were (and still are) among the greatest in the history of television and top my wish list for Blu-ray. Then came seasons 4-5, which (for many reasons, some beyond the producers' control) were a slow, agonizing insult to everything that had come before.

I HIGHLY recommend seeking out the earlier seasons and following the series up through "I Am Curious... Maddie" (season 3's penultimate episode).

Then... STOP RIGHT THERE and finish things off with this... http://moonlightingbttf.com/

Going this route will save you MUCH heartache.

Moonlighting was ripped off relentlessly by American shows in the 90’s (Ally McBeal being the biggest offender, but others like The Drew Carey Show did, too). I was rewatching the season 3 episode with the Will Vinton Claymation scene and it’s still so unbelievably well-written

[weir]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

Finally, in 2005, Lionsgate (back when it was still Lions Gate) licensed the entire series for DVD from Disney because TV on DVD was huge then. It was exceedingly expensive to re-license all the songs, but they managed to do it. I don't know of any song replacements in the entire run of the show, except for the accidentally switched underscore in "The Lady in the Iron Mask," which was never corrected.

The Lions Gate DVDs are long, long OOP. Since ABC owned the show, it's a Disney property. They don't seem to have any interest in putting catalog TV shows onto BD, or in licensing them anymore either.

I have a feeling the best we can hope for is that, at some point, they remaster it in HD for streaming, once they decide if Hulu is really going to be their grown-up streaming service, since this clearly won't ever run on Disney+.

Any new release of the series on disc or streaming, would likely cause another round of music licensing. Keep those Lionsgate DVDs safe.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by weir

Any new release of the series on disc or streaming, would likely cause another round of music licensing. Keep those Lionsgate DVDs safe.

I could be wrong on any of this, please correct me if I am, but I believe:

A) contractually, streaming is considered broadcast
B) the original license for music for TV in that era was generally for broadcast in perpetuity

I believe Disney could upload Moonlighting to Hulu tomorrow, if they wanted.

The thing they cannot do is offer it for sale digitally, on any platform, without relicensing all the music.

My understanding about why Lions Gate had to relicense all the songs is that home media wasn't included in the original license.

Bravo was running the show simultaneously with the release of the first DVD in 2000, the Anchor Bay one, which had its second disc cancelled due to the cost of music licensing, and Bravo certainly didn't pay to relicense all the songs.

As another example of a similar show from that era, Quantum Leap was streaming on Amazon for years with the original pop songs, which were as extensive as Moonlighting, but the DVDs lazily replaced them all. Quantum Leap was pointedly never available for purchase digitally, you could only stream it, since that's covered under the broadcast contracts.

It was only the recent BD set for Quantum Leap, oddly enough, that paid the big bucks to license all the songs for home media.

[poisonmail]

Rewatching the Lionsgate DVDs and it’s quite staggering how much high-profile music is in each episode. It’s quite lucky that we had that brief window in which putting something like this together was actually profitable, though it’s too bad they’re so long out of print. Thinking about ripping my copies to a hard drive just to be safe!

[meremortal]

Never seen it, but Bruce Williams was arguably fairly underrated as a comedic actor.

[JediJones77]

A new book on Moonlighting just came out this month and Vanity Fair published an excerpt. The author said something about the current unavailability of the show. First my comments...if Disney is going to attempt to force everyone to buy into their streaming model and phase out home video releases, then they CAN'T be stingy about paying for the rights to put all of their content out. You can't simultaneously say the show is too expensive to release and then take away our ability to pay for it on disc directly. Clearly the demand was there to produce it on DVD 15 years ago and sell out every copy made. If you've destroyed the home video market by forcing the streaming model on us, then you can't hold content hostage from going on your streaming services that was already proven popular enough to sell on disc.

As for Quantum Leap, I looked at a thread on that, and it looked like someone documented that over 50 songs had been replaced in the DVDs of seasons 2 through 4, and maybe more in season 5. It sounds like the music was possibly restored in foreign DVD releases by 2012. And then apparently almost all of it was restored for the 2017 U.S. Blu-ray release. And this was a Mill Creek release, so not even a major media conglomerate. The idea that Disney can't afford the music rights for Moonlighting is preposterous (or likewise, NBC for more full Saturday Night Live season releases past 1980).

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...ic-shakespeare

"By the way, if you’re curious about where you can watch, or rewatch, Moonlighting, the series can currently be found…just about nowhere. Incredibly, it’s not on a streaming service, the DVDs are out of print, and it was never released on Blu-ray. When Moonlighting was on the top of the Nielsen ratings, TV series didn’t lock up long-term contracts for the use of songs. Today, it would cost a great deal for Disney, which owns the series, to secure all the necessary music rights. For now, the book will have to suffice, unless your local library has those out of print DVDs—and you kept your DVD player."

[James Luckard]

As I posted above, I'm fairly sure Moonlighting could be streamed on Hulu tomorrow, if Disney wanted to. However, it would have to be for streaming only.

The issue is selling it - either on DVD or digital download. That's home video, and not covered by old contracts.

Streaming is considered the same as syndication or a cable broadcast legally, as far as I know, and I'm fairly certain of this.

Moonlighting never had its many songs changed when it ran on Bravo or Lifetime back in the late 90s/early 2000s. I watched it on Lifetime and taped every single episode off Bravo, before the DVDs existed.

Again, as posted above, during the period when Quantum Leap was having its songs replaced on DVD, it was simultaneously streaming on Amazon with all the original music intact. You just couldn't buy any episodes at Amazon, you could only stream them. Once either Universal (the rights owners) or Mill Creek (the licensee) re-negotiated the music for the Blu-Ray, suddenly you could buy digital downloads of Quantum Leap as well.

Broadcast/Syndication/Cable/Streaming are all the same, contractually, to the best of my knowledge. It's home video/digital download purchases that are the issue.

It's conceivable that Moonlighting is a unique case, due to the sheer volume of MASSIVE hit music it used, but I'd be genuinely surprised to learn that.

[James Luckard]

I'm grateful to learn about the book.

Here's the info:


https://www.amazon.com/Moonlighting-...dp/1949024261/

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by JediJones77

The idea that Disney can't afford the music rights for Moonlighting is preposterous

Nobody is suggesting Disney can't afford to license the songs. They could buy every one of the songs outright from the publishers and artists, if they wanted, and not even notice.

The issue is that Disney has probably run the numbers and found that there would be no profit in re-licensing the songs for Blu-Ray/digital download. They may be the current custodians of "Moonlighting," but they're not an arts charity, so if there's not a sizable profit in it, they won't do it. Even if they found there would be a marginal profit, they probably still wouldn't do it, because it wouldn't be worth the time and expense of all the contracts, etc. Sad, but true.

At least we have the DVDs, with the correct music on every episode but one. That one was a mistake. The DVD version of "The Lady in the Iron Mask" used the wrong musical score - the rejected original score, not the replacement score by Alf Clausen that was used for the original broadcast. It was nothing to do with pop songs.

[BluBonnet]

Originally Posted by meremortal

Never seen it, but Bruce Williams was arguably fairly underrated as a comedic actor.

Oh, yes, the legendary Bruce Williams.

[James Luckard]

BTW, I bought the book above and read it last week. It's AMAZING.

Enough time has finally passed for everyone to be open and honest about what happened - the highs and the lows.

Nobody comes off like a villain, but the reasons for the show's downfall are explained clearly, for the first time, in tremendous detail.

The book also has whole chapters on the show's most iconic episodes. Obviously, there was the Atomic Shakespeare episode, that chapter was excerpted in Vanity Fair, but there are chapters on my favorite episode, Big Man on Mulberry Street, on the B&W episode, and on the 4-episode arc with Mark Harmon, which is the show at its absolute creative pinnacle, but was also apparently when all the personal relationships finally combusted.

Anyone who loves this show MUST read and own this book, and no, I don't work for the guy who wrote it, haha.