'Moonlighting' is back: Remember its Billy Joel episode?
Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis dance to Billy Joel's "Big Man on Mulberry Street" on a 1986 episode of "Moonlighting." Credit: ABC / Everett Collection
Long unavailable to streaming, ABC’s groundbreaking romance-mystery series “Moonlighting” came to Hulu on Tuesday, including a third-season episode built around one Billy Joel song and using another as background music.
The episode of Nov. 18, 1986, “Big Man on Mulberry Street,” titled after Joel’s song on the 1986 album “The Bridge,” “honestly fell over the transom,” series creator Glenn Gordon Caron, 69, told Entertainment Weekly. It was Joel’s idea to offer it, he said. "Phil Ramone, who I produced the ‘Moonlighting’ soundtrack album with, called me one day and he said, ‘Billy Joel wrote a song for you and the show.’ And I said, ‘What?’ ”
Caron — who was born in Manhattan and raised in Oceanside, graduating from Oceanside High School — said he “was astounded and really excited because [the Hicksville-raised] Billy Joel comes from Long Island. I come from Long Island. I never met him, but I felt this connection.”
He recalled that the song, which runs 5½ minutes in its already-released album version, “was nine minutes long. I was like, 'I'm not quite sure what to do with this.' But I'd always wanted to do storytelling through dance. I was always looking for an opportunity to do that. And I thought, 'Well, this is the chance.' So, we built the whole episode around that."
Supervising producer Karen Hall, who wrote the episode, told the Los Angeles Times in 1986 that, “Glenn gave me the tape and told me to play it in my car for a while and see if it inspired me enough to work it into one of our episodes.”
The story sees Bruce Willis’ free-spirited L.A. private detective David Addison traveling to New York City for a funeral for his ex-wife’s brother. David’s business partner/potential paramour Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) was unaware David had been married. In a 6½-minute sequence from the 14:14 mark to 20:42 in the episode, she dreams of a movie-musical number in a beatnik Greenwich Village cafe. There, her conception of a sultry ex-wife (dancer-actor Sandahl Bergman) seduces waiter David, followed by stylized sets in which she marries him and becomes unfaithful. A dejected David returns to the cafe, where Maddie herself arrives to dance with him, culminating in a kiss.
Choreographed by the married team of Jacqui and Bill Landrum, that scene in the Christian I. Nyby II-directed episode was directed by the legendary Stanley Donen (1949’s “On the Town,” 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain” and other classics) — credited in an end-card as: “Our Deepest Appreciation to Mr. Stanley Donen.”
"I said, 'Hey, would you come direct this number?' and he laughed at me," Caron told EW. "And I said, 'What's so funny?' He said, 'Well, what do you pay?' I said, 'Well, we're not paying anything.' And he said, 'How many days do I have?' I said, 'You probably have to do it in a day.' And he said, 'Well, that's absurd.' Long story short, I finally convinced him. We took three days. It's one of the most exciting moments in my life — getting to know Stanley and developing a friendship with Stanley. Because he was one of my idols. It was truly one of the highlights of my life."
In addition to the title song, Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” from the 1976 album “Turnstiles,” plays in the background of a scene set in a New York bar where a wake is being held, as David makes a pay phone call to Maddie in L.A.
