And such nostalgia! The show hearkens back to a better, simpler time. A time back when Bruce Willis still had his hair and was trying to mount a singing career. Those were times, people. Those were times. I only vaguely recall when this deliciously campy send up of the time-honored detective show made its debut on ABC in 1986. I was six at the time, and I don't know that my tiny brain would have fully grasped the majesty of Shepherd 's comic timing or the electrifying sexual tension between her Maddie Hayes, a former model-turned-businesswoman and Willis's macho detective David Addison. And certainly I wouldn't have appreciated, as I do now, the cheese-tastically gauzy soft-focus camera work and the wisecracking, rat-a-tat dialogue.

My first real experience with Moonlighting was when it aired in reruns on Lifetime, but better late than never I always say. Even then, some of its finer points eluded me. I didn't appreciate, for example, the culty cred the show had due to the character Herbert Viola, played by Revenge of the Nerds uberskeeze Booger (nee Curtis Armstrong). Or that the funny-seeming tendency the characters had to talk about their director and scripts and the set was a quirky comedic device known as "breaking the fourth wall." I was simply charmed by the screwball antics that went on inside Blue Moon Detective Agency: the love-hate patter between Hayes and Addison that at reminded me of all those Jimmy Stewart/Katharine Hepburn movies my mom spoon-fed me from the womb, the Columbo-lite approach to pot-boiler mysteries (which is to this day about as much as my wimpy little self can handle), and of course, Agnes, the original nerd-girl vixen.

The problem, of course, was that after Maddie and David finally got together at the end of Season Three -- a hugely satisfying union, to be sure -- all that pent up tension and loaded repartee went the way of the buffalo and the otherwise flimsy storylines couldn't sustain the show. It's a familiar pitfall that newer, wiser shows like House and Bones have managed to avoid by creating other compelling components besides a sizzling hot passive-aggressive love story. But hey, it was the Eighties. This was a decade that prized shoulder pads and contouring eyeshadow. Clearly they didn't know any better.

My greatest hope is that if this Moonlighting film becomes a reality, us diehard (see what I did there?) fans aren't subjected to the conventional "main characters get married, have a kid, divorce, are then thrown back together by some craaazy turn of events and fall in love all over again" back story. Everyone's a little (lot) older and more seasoned now, and twenty years is plenty of time to reflect on the reasons why Moonlighting unraveled the way it did. With luck, the film will honor the show's less muddled beginnings and serve up an old-timey caper worthy of the deli meats amongst which the germ of the idea was born.

But if they do away with the soft focus, I'll be really pissed.