CBS has canceled Medium.

After having its seventh-season episode order cut from 22 episodes to 13 last month, Medium was officially canceled this week by CBS, with its final episode set to air in January. The supernatural drama, which stars Patricia Arquette as a psychic who helps the Phoenix DA's office solve crimes, spent its first five seasons on NBC before being rescued from cancellation by CBS. Now its luck has finally run out.

This is a golden opportunity, however, for Medium creator and executive producer Glenn Gordon Caron, who previously created the network series Now and Again (CBS, 1999-2000) and Moonlighting (ABC, 1985-1989), which was my favorite show when I was growing up. He was also the brains behind "When I Grow Up" (a.k.a. "Fling"), a series that never aired despite six episodes having been completed by the time Fox pulled the plug in 2001; a pseudo-update of Moonlighting, it featured Amy Sedaris, one of the funniest people on the planet, playing the Ms. DiPesto receptionist role, and was reportedly axed because Caron wouldn't take input from network brass. Now, with the cancellation of his latest—and longest-running—network series, Caron finally has a chance to create a series for HBO. (C'mon, guys, schedule a meeting already!)

One of the main reasons I loved Moonlighting when I was growing up was because it didn't follow the rules of other shows. The main characters, private detectives Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) and David Addison (Bruce Willis), occasionally talked to the camera and acknowledged they were characters on a TV show; overlapping dialogue was common; and comedy, drama, and romance were often combined in the same episode in equal measures. In its third season the episode "Big Man on Mulberry Street" showcased quietly dramatic moments for Shepherd and Willis that surrounded a stylish dance number choreographed by Singin' in the Rain codirector Stanley Donen; one week later "Atomic Shakespeare" featured iambic pentameter and a full-dress parody of The Taming of the Shrew.

For a while anything was possible on Moonlighting. It was wildly creative and had an energy no other show could match. No wonder it burned out so quickly.

Though Caron and company were supposed to complete 22 episodes of Moonlighting each season after the first, the most they ever delivered was 18 in the second season. Even the show's abbreviated first season ended up one episode short of ABC's six-episode order. Caron did complete 22 episodes of Now and Again for CBS more than a decade later, but rumor has it he went overbudget on the last few episodes of the show's one and only season in order to finish them on time. Since the show's ratings had steadily decreased throughout the season, the network pulled the plug; Now and Again ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved.

I never read of any production delays on Medium, but I'm sure Caron would jump at the chance to produce just 13 or 10 or even 8 episodes per season, which is standard at HBO. Before he created The Sopranos for HBO, David Chase had written for network shows like The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure. Before The Wire and Treme, David Simon worked on NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street. And before Six Feet Under, Alan Ball spent time writing for the Cybill Shepherd sitcom Cybill; he once said that the former Moonlighting star's diva-like behavior frustrated him so much that he decided the best way to deal with it was to channel his anger into a script titled American Beauty, which eventually won him the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2000.

It's my guess that Caron would similarly thrive at a cable network that prides itself on letting inventive writer-producers do what they do best.

why my favorite TV show died

A radio station in Charleston, South Carolina, claimed that Moonlighting, my favorite show when I was younger, never recovered after the writers' strike that delayed the beginning of the 1988 fall season. Or so my friend Beau told me, as his wife, Kristen, had told him. But those Charleston DJs were only half right. Here's what I wrote to Beau and Kristen ...

Moonlighting was hurt by a lot of things. As one person who worked on the show said, the show's slow demise came about because "Cybill Shepherd got pregnant and Bruce Willis got rich." Shepherd got pregnant in early '87, during the show's third season, although her pregnancy wasn't worked into the show until that fall, during the fourth season. Glenn Gordon Caron, the show's creator, said he couldn't see any way around the pregnancy—avoiding the issue would've prevented Shepherd from being shot below chest level, and that would've made scenes with her very static and confined to desks or tables.

Long story short, the first part of the fourth season involved Maddie in Chicago staying with her parents while trying to figure out whether she should go back to David and the detective agency and let him know she was pregnant (the audience, not to mention David, didn't know if it was his baby or third-season guest star Mark Harmon's). Because Maddie was in Chicago, David solved cases with Herbert Viola, a.k.a. "Booger" from Revenge of the Nerds. Not as much fun as Maddie and David solving crimes together, but by that point they'd "done it," which took all of the sexual tension away. It's a slippery slope once the romantic leads on a TV show get together, of course, and unlike Cheers, Moonlighting didn't have a bunch of supporting characters to fall back on in case viewers got sick of the main characters bickering back and forth. All you had were Herbert and Ms. DiPesto, who were funny in small doses, yet they ended up having two episodes to themselves during the fourth season while Shepherd and Willis were indisposed. Two whole episodes—and only 14 were produced that season.

The fourth season was cut short due to the writers' strike, but during the previous season Moonlighting had only produced 15 episodes, and the one before that produced just 18. It was supposed to deliver 22 episodes a season just like any other show, but it never did, partly due to Glenn Gordon Caron being such a perfectionist and delivering script rewrites at the last minute. (I've read that production on his current show, NBC's Medium, is somewhat disorganized, but he's managed to produce 22 episodes per season so far, as he did for the one and only season of his 1999-2000 CBS series, Now and Again.)

I do like Ms. DiPesto and Herbert Viola more now that I'm older. But when I was in grade school I just wanted to see Maddie and David flirt and watch Bruce Willis be cool and funny. He hasn't been all that funny since Moonlighting, and he wasn't even that funny during the last two seasons. He looked a bit bored, to be honest.

By the way, I lied when I said "long story short." 

Willis was in those early fourth-season episodes much more than Shepherd, and he was reportedly angry that he had to carry the show while shooting Die Hard at the same time. By the tail end of the season Maddie had returned to Los Angeles, but she got married to a stranger on a train on her way back from Chicago, which made almost every fan groan (the grade-school ones anyway). She called it off the day of the "official" wedding, realizing she still loved David, and then the season ended one episode later, with the quickie annulment of Maddie's quickie marriage and a comment on the writers' strike in the last segment. Like other Moonlighting episodes, this one had ended up a few minutes short, so an extra scene was filmed with Maddie and David talking to the audience about how the writers were on strike and they didn't know how to fill the extra time. They ended up making Herbert dance to "Wooly Bully."

When the show returned in December of '88 along with other network shows, Maddie had a miscarriage, which made more fans groan, but at least that concluded the show's soap-opera aspects for the most part. Then it was back to Maddie and David solving crimes together, which I was happy to see when I was in seventh grade, but once I got older I realized it was ridiculous—as Willis said in an interview after the show ended, there was no way those two would've continued to work together after having gone through such a long, stormy affair.

Moonlighting was put on hiatus by ABC in February of '89 because its ratings had fallen so far (those ratings probably wouldn't look so bad today, though, compared to what a normal low-ranking network show generates in 2007); it returned two months later, but on Sundays at 8 instead of Tuesdays at 9. The fifth season consisted of 13 episodes, and the last six were cranked out quickly in order to get Moonlighting up to the bare minimum needed for syndication on a cable network—Lifetime showed it in the early '90s, and Bravo aired it earlier this decade, but it never reached regular syndication like, say, Magnum, P.I. or NYPD Blue, which produced more episodes per season over longer runs.

So yeah, the writers' strike didn't help Moonlighting get its momentum back, but it was already in serious trouble before that.