It's a Wonderful Job

Air Dates: 16 Dec 1986, 29 Dec 1987

Synopsis:

This episode is loosely based on Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and is the second of two Moonlighting Christmas episodes. The other one is T'was the Episode Before Christmas.

It's nine days before Christmas, and Maddie has asked the office staff to work over the holidays because there's so much work to do. But the office staff is angry and resentful and threatens to quit. In her reciprocated anger, Maddie says she wishes that she'd never kept the Blue Moon offices open, and that the last two years had never happened.

In a bar, trying to forget her unhappiness, she meets Albert. Albert says he's her guardian angel, come to grant her wish. Suddenly, the last two years never happened, she and David never went into the Blue Moon business together, and Albert shows her what the lives of the people around her have become. Agnes is the president of a rhyming greeting card company. David marries Cheryl Tiegs. What had been the Blue Moon offices now belong to the Hart Detective Agency (an inside joke reference to the television detective show Hart to Hart).

In these experiences, Maddie experiences a change of heart. She sees herself in Agnes (who has become cold-hearted in her attempt to run her business, not like the loving Agnes that Maddie knew at Blue Moon), and she doesn't like what she sees. From David, she learns that he really does respect her and care for her. Worst of all, Albert shows her that without them, Maddie has had "a very bad year."

Then she wakes up, thinking that it has all been a dream, and relieved that the world has gone back to the way it had been, because she realizes that she would have missed Blue Moon if Albert had taken it away from her. She returns to the offices to find David, Agnes, and MacGilicuddy. She makes her peace with them, cancels all Blue Moon work for the holidays, and gives David a very passionate kiss on an office desk.

Directed by Ed Sherin

Written by Debra Frank and Carl Sautter

Guest Stars:

Memorable Dialog and Additional Links:

• See Christine Graves's Moonlighting Madness page for this episode.

Music:

• the cast sings a bit of It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas
• White Christmas, performed by Darlene Love
• Sleigh Ride, performed by The Ronettes
• instrumental version of Silent Night as Maddie revisits the Blue Moon office after her experience
• The theme from Dynasty when we first meet Agnes as the president of her rhyming greeting card company

Notes:

• When Moonlighting debuted, ABC gave it the Tuesday night timeslot formerly occupied by Hart to Hart, which concluded at the same time. This means that Moonlighting quite literally took the place of Hart to Hart on ABC, and John Fernandez has pointed out to me that the appearance of Lionel Stander and the Hart Agency in this episode may be interpreted as more than just as a casual reference to a contemporary man/woman detective show, but might be intended to have the deeper and more humorous implication that if Moonlighting hadn't ever happened, then Hart to Hart might still be on television in its place.
• It's an interesting continuity goof that when Maddie and Max are talking, he recognizes the name "Blue Moon Investigations." But before Maddie became involved with the agency, its name had been "City of Angels Investigations," which means that in Max's timeline, from his point of view, Blue Moon never existed.

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