Cybill Shepherd said her eponymous 1990s sitcom “would have run another five years” but she didn’t “fall on the right side” — meaning she refused to sleep with Les Moonves.
“I didn’t, I didn’t — wasn’t gonna fall at all for Les,” the former Moonlighting star said in an interview set to air today on SiriusXM’s The Michelle Collins Show.
Shepherd said she went on a dinner date with the now-disgraced CBS exec that was set up by their respective assistants. “We went to it, and he was, well, he was telling me his wife didn’t turn him on, some mistress didn’t turn him on,” she said. “And I’m watching him drink alcohol, and I’m going, he says, well, you know, ‘Why don’t you let me take you home?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve got a ride,’ and I had my car outside with a good friend of mine who is an off-duty LAPD officer.”
The actress said the dinner happened “a few seasons” into Cybill, the Chuck Lorre-created comedy that ran from midseason 1995 through 1998 on CBS. She said she started receiving notes from the network shortly thereafter saying she no longer could do some of the things she’d been doing on the show since it launched.
“We did a lot of jokes,” Shepherd told Collins. “It’s just funny to see somebody who’s, quote, ‘pretty,’ you know, talking with some food in their mouth, not overdoing it. It’s just funny. And then I got that note: ‘Don’t do that anymore. Don’t have Cybill talk while she’s eating.’ Then it was, OK, we had done one menopause episode, then we were going to do a second one. They said you can’t use menses, menstruation, or period.”
The host asked her: “After this dinner date … obviously you made it clear you weren’t interested — he’s married, et cetera. How soon after that then did you find that you were having issues with the series?” Shepherd replied, “Quite shortly afterwards.”
Collins then asked, “Do you think back to that day and wonder if things had had gone differently, what would have happened to the show?”
Shepherd said, “It would have run another five years.” She called Moonves “a brilliant man who was acting stupid. We can all act stupid no matter how intelligent we are.”
Collins then asked, “Did you feel vindicated when … let’s be honest, the shit is still hitting the fan when it comes to this guy’s — I guess you could call it his career, his impact, his crimes?”
Shepherd replied: “His crimes, yeah. Yeah, it was, it was very painful.”
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