Madeline "Maddie" Hayes and David Addison welcome you to the Blue Moon Detective Agency, where danger is their business, as long as it doesn`t get in the way of their rapid-fire repartee of nonstop bickering. Featuring guest appearances by Orson Welles, Eva Marie Saint, Whoopi Goldberg and Tim Robbins, this DVD collection includes all 24 episodes from the series` first and second seasons, a quirky blend of comedy and mystery that made Moonlighting one of the most innovative shows in television history...

While, for it's time, Moonlighting was pretty groundbreaking - an hour long comedy on American TV was a new concept and the fact that the characters would on occasion look into the camera and talk to the audience was again fairly novel - in truth it has not aged gracefully at all, and to be honest the episodes are pretty hit and miss.

The pilot sets everything up and introduces ex-model Maddie Hayes who decides to get rid of the handful of failing companies she owns after an accountant does a run with her money. One of the remaining companies is an unsuccessful private detective agency which has never made any money. The current boss, David Addison, wants to keep his job, and eventually talks Maddie into forming a partnership.

The show's first season, and the majority of the second, focused on the newly rebranded New Moon Detective Agency keeping the wolf from the door as they try to make ends meet. The cases they tackled generally just fell into place rather than succeeding because Maddie and David had any great detective skills.

Throughout this collection there are a number of ongoing gags and narratives. These include Maddie and David's rocky relationship; David's often poorly thought out ideas for new movies / TV shows / musicals; Agnes DiPesto's heavy breathing called; DiPesto answering the office phones in rhyme; and the odd episode introduced by Maddie and David.

Highlights in this collection include:

Next Stop Murder: Miss DiPesto wins a contest to climb aboard mystery writer J.B. Harland's murder train. Every year Harland invites a few of his friends and the winner of a writing contest to try to solve a make-believe murder mystery aboard a moving train. Maddie and David accidentally end up getting stuck on the train too, which is just as well, as a real murder is committed and it's down to everyone to work out whodunit. This episode also stars the late Vincent Schiavelli who was Allyce Beasley's (DiPesto) real life husband.

The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice: This opens with Orsen Welles's last filmed role. It aired five days after Welles's death, and was dedicated to him. The episode sees Maddie and David each dreaming their own solution to an old unsolved murder case that dates back to 1946, with both of them taking the place of the two main murder suspects.

Somewhere Under the Rainbow: When a young woman turns up at the Blue Moon Detective Agency asking for help, Maddie and David argue over whether to take the case. She claims to be an Irish leprechaun who needs help keeping thugs away from her pot of gold. Okay, while the actress playing the "leprechaun" has about the worst Irish accent you've ever heard, but this is a pretty interesting episode. The twist is fun, if you can suspend disbelief in the fact that a woman would really believe she was a leprechaun for all these years.

Every Daughter's Father Is a Virgin: Maddie's parents are in town for a friends wedding. Maddie's mother strongly suspects that her husband is having an affair, so David is hired to find out.

Witness for the Execution: A sick old man wants to hire Maddie and David's services to witness his murder. He claims to have hired someone to switch off his machine that helps him breath at night, but needs someone to witness the event so that his insurance company will pay out to his family. But when David turns up everything points to him as the murderer.

Funeral for a Door Nail: After a woman is killed in a car accident, her depressed husband realises he can't live without her. He hires a hit man to kill him. But, when he thinks he sees her alive and well, he contacts the Blue Moon Detective Agency to stop the hitman killing him. There's an amusing homage to Star Wars as David and a suspect fight with mops as the Star Wars theme plays in the background.

The first season only ran to seven episodes, but there's no indication on the discs of where the split it - although it's fairly obvious when you watch the episodes.

Extras include Not Just a Day Job - The Story of Moonlighting: Part One (14 min, 52 sec featurette that looks at the history of the show with interviews from all the main cast and crew); Inside the Blue Moon Detective Agency - The Story of Moonlighting: Part Two (15 min, 37 sec featurette that again features the main cast and crew and talks about how the show was different to other shows on TV at the time); and The Moonlighting Phenomenon (11 min 38 sec featurette that interviews cast, crew and Moonlighting fan club members on the popularity of the show).

While this box set is pretty cheap, it does have its problems. The picture quality is pretty bad and there are no chapter points on the episodes. While you could argue that it's an old show, this collection is being released on the same day as Season One of Diff'rent Strokes on DVD. For that release, Sony has cleaned up the original prints, and inserted chapter points so that you don't have to listen to the theme tune for every episode.

Still, for diehard Moonlighting fans, this is a collection well worth owning.

7

Darren Rea