Moonlighting 4×04 — “Tale in Two Cities”: Season 4 of Moonlighting was one that I watched very sporadically. At that point, the episodes started going way downhill in terms of quality, and there were so few new episodes (just 14 stretched across this entire season) that viewers were getting reruns more often than not. In pre-TiVo days, that made it harder to bring myself to be available at 8pm on Tuesday night just in case Moonlighting was on. So I’ve been giving my DVDs a bit of a workout recently.

For me, episode 4×04 represents in a nutshell what went wrong with Moonlighting. First of all, Maddie and David did not share any scenes together. She was in Chicago with her parents, and he was in L.A. with the rest of the Blue Moon gang. Sorry, but I did not tune into Moonlighting to see dirty, scruffy Curtis Armstrong kissing David Addison’s ass all night long. David and Maddie, their fun bantering and crazy arguments… that was the central attraction.

And second, the writers didn’t even bother trying to throw a case in there. There was no client, no mystery, nothing but a lot of pointless scenes with David and Bert, and a few other scenes of Maddie looking depressed. Watching David go out on the town with Viola was just painful. I think this ep was even worse than the one where Ray Charles showed up in David’s living room to play piano and dispense relationship advice in song form. Ugh.

Oh, and don’t forget the pregnancy bomb. Poor Maddie, with no one to tell except her receptionist? Yeah, definitely time to take stock of life at that point.

Actually, it’s kind of sad to relive these terrible episodes. But as with the proverbial train wreck, it’s impossible to look away!