Moonlighting.

SEARCHING FOR HORIZONTAL TELEVISION'S IDEA of class is Dynasty: silk sheets and straight faces. The idea that a lowly sitcom might conceivably aspire to sophistication is anathema; indeed, ABC's Moonlighting, the first plausibly stylish sitcom in recent memory to score with a mass audience, was actually tagged as a dramatic series at this year's Emmy awards. (This, incidentally, is a typical example of television logic at work. Sitcoms are half an hour long. Each Moonlighting episode is an hour long. Moonlighting is thus a dramatic series.)

Being the hottest new show of the season, Moonlighting naturally pulled down 16 Emmy nominations. But television dotes on the familiar, and since Moonlighting was also the least predictable show of the season, it wound up winning exactly one award. The confusion is understandable. For not only has Glen Gordon Caron, the creator of Moonlighting, broken out of the familiar half-hour sitcom mold, he's even had the audacity to steal from somebody comparatively new: Alfred Hitchcock.

Homages to Hitchcock turn up with some regularity on Moonlighting. (One episode actually lifted Bernard Herrmann's background music for Vertigo.) But the biggest homage is in the very conception of the series itself, which fits neatly into the mold of what Dorothy L. Sayers called the "love story with detective interruptions," a genre of which Hitchcock was the undisputed cinematic master and North by Northwest the grandly stylized archetype. The plot of North by Northwest is a mere distraction. Style is all: bizarre juxtapositions, sensational camera work, obliquely witty dialogue between Cary Grant and a gelid blonde. No one has ever tried anything quite like this on television, which is why Moonlighting seems so fresh.

There is, of course, more to Moonlighting than rewarmed Hitchcock. Caron has also lovingly gleaned such stock devices as overlapping dialogue, rapid-fire delivery, and climactic bursts of slapstick from Hollywood's old "screwball" comedies. While some episodes of Moonlighting rely heavily on a straightforward whodunit plot, others throw out the plot altogether in favor of varyingly elaborate parodies of the more time-honored conventions of theatrical suspense. A typical example of this latter approach was last season's "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice," in which David Addison and Maddie Hayes, the principal characters on Moonlighting, dreamed different versions (shot in black and white) of the same James Cain jealous-husband-gets-stiffed story line. But the best Moonlighting scripts invariably use plot as a Wodehouse-like foundation over which the real suspense of the series is spun: When, if ever, will Dave and Maddie finally go to bed together?

This is where Caron and his oddball team of writers make common cause with the customary preoccupations of series television. The Law of Romantic Intersection says that any likely-looking TV couple will eventually fall in love, and much of the show's charm derives from the fact that Dave and Maddie are by far the most likely-looking couple on television. Cybill Shepherd, who plays Maddie, the blonde ex-model who owns the Blue Moon Detective Agency, is an amiably sexy foil. And Caron, in the series's most original touch, has replaced the suave Cary Grant figure of the original Hitchcock model with a hip babyboomer. Bruce Willis's flawless portrayal of Dave, at once glib, cocky, and rueful, sets the tone for the show at least as much as do the scripts, and the easy confidence with which he handles the odd flashes of emotional seriousness that surface from time to time on Moonlighting leads one to suspect that a major movie career is just around the corner.

The producers of Moonlighting all too frequently mistake unevenness for unpredictability. The scripts oscillate wildly from fey and foolish fantasies (one client thought she was a leprechaun) to stodgy exercises in detection littered with poorly concealed clues. No more than one episode in three works all the way through. And there are two elements at war in almost every script: stylization and naturalism. Whenever stylization wins out--which can usually be measured by the number of times either Dave or Maddie speaks directly to the viewers at home in the course of an evening--the show suffers accordingly. One of last season's episodes, for instance, was prefaced by a scene in which Dave and Maddie spent a few moments answering letters from viewers, all of which asked if they were ever going to "get horizontal," the favored Moonlighting euphemism for carnal knowledge. This kind of archness can be hugely exasperating.

Will Moonlighting move toward greater naturalism or greater stylization? The dramatic balance of the series is unstable enough to suggest that some kind of shift is inevitable. One recent episode was a straight steal of Hitchcock's Vertigo plot with the Dave-Maddie relationship used strictly as seasoning. On the other hand, Caron has already announced plans to do an episode in iambic pentameter. Such unrestrained silliness could eventually turn Moonlighting into a cult failure. Viewers, after all, demand a steadily increasing degree of credibility from series characters on whose lives they eavesdrop once a week. The popular success of Moonlighting is undoubtedly a direct function of the warm and engaging relationship that Mr. Willis and Miss Shepherd manage to convey on the small screen. All of which suggests that the future of Moonlighting probably depends as much as anything else on whether Dave and Maddie ever quit looking to get horizontal.