Moonlighting/Trivia

• Creative Differences: This was the first time Cybill Shepherd feuded with a show-runner (creator Glenn Gordon Caron) and eventually had him fired. It would not be the last.
• Executive Meddling: Subverted and played straight with "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice"; ABC at first threatened to veto the episode due the fact that it switched to black and white for half the episode and even threatened to air the entire episode in color, against the wishes of the creative team. To get around this, they shot the dream sequences on black and white film rather than color film which would then be turned black and white to keep the suits from undoing the conversion process. However, the network forced them to do a disclaimer at the start of the episode, which led series creator Glenn Gordon Caron to hire Orson Welles to do an introduction where he praised the show for doing the flashback sequences in black and white.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For ages, the show was unavailable on video and was withheld from syndication due to the low episode count (barely 60 some episodes). Anchor Bay released the pilot in the late 90s but it wasn't until 2007 that the series FINALLY got a DVD release as all five season came out.
• Reality Subtext:
  • Allegedly (much like their characters), Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd did not like each other, despite their in-show romantic involvement.
  • Actually Bruce Willis notes that immediately prior to doing a screentest for the show, he flirted with Cybill in the elevator, which for him was the real audition. Cybill Shepherd supports this in her autobiography by claiming that they almost had 'a thing' but chose to keep it non-sexual. YMMV on whether or not any of this is true, because she claimed in the same autobiography to have turned down Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, among others.