Moonlighting 3.08

It’s a Wonderful Job

Maddie has a bad day. No one in at the Blue Moon Agency is happy because she has insisted that they work the week of Christmas. David tries to talk her into changing her mind but she won’t.

Maddie was planning to visit her Aunt Ruth in the hospital later that day but then she finds out that her aunt died. Maddie leaves the office and goes to a bar for a drink. A man named Albert approaches her. He offers to listen to her talk about whatever is bothering her, but she’s not interested in his offer. She wishes that she had just sold the Blue Moin Detective Agency instead of keeping it.

Albert reveals that he’s her guardian angel and that he has just granted her wish. She returns to the building where Blue Moon is located only to find Hart Investigations, instead of Blue Moon. She leaves the building with Albert, who materialized just after she left the office. He takes her to see Ms. DiPesto, who now runs a greeting card company. Ms. DiPesto has a ruthless management style. None f her employees, which include Burt Viola, are happy. Agnes, just like Maddie, is making her employees work through Christmas.

Albert next takes Maddie to see David. He bought her house and is about to get married to Cheryl Tiegs. Maddie listens in as David talks to Charles, his brother. David speculates that he felt that there was something special about Maddie but then he admits that he only met her twice.

Albert shows Maddie what happened to herself. She got increasingly depressed until she decided to kill herself. Maddie begs Albert to change things back to the way they were. He tells her he can’t but then she wakes up in the bar where she met Albert but he’s not there. 

Maddie rushes back to the office. Everything is back as it was. The episode ends with her and David kissing. 

Thoughts

This episode is very clearly a riff on It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I like both the movie and this episode. It is a bit predictable but I love how they imagined the lives of David, Agnes, and Burt going without Maddie.

The Hart Agency is a reference to Hart to Hart, a show which ran for five years on the same network as Moonlighting but off the air by the time that this episode aired. I may have seen an episode or two of Hart to Hart back in the 1980s but I don't have any strong memories of watching it.