‘Murphy Brown’ is a welcome sight
Does the unseen hand that guides the universe also keep a firm grip on the remote control?
How else to explain “Murphy Brown’s” boisterous and welcome return to TV on the very same day a woman was scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee and recount how an ultraconservative Supreme Court nominee allegedly assaulted her more than three decades ago? No one could have possibly planned this convergence of pop culture, feminism and the fate of the judicial branch, yet here we are, wandering through a hall of news clips, sitcom memories and funhouse mirrors. What year is this? What planet is this?
I don’t know anymore, but what I can tell you is that Murphy’s comeback is as reassuring and entertaining as it is timely. The series, which was to return Thursday to CBSafter great (and, yes, deserved) anticipation, ably harnesses the feminist anger and modern media frustrations of both its lead character and its creator, Diane English, resulting in a sitcom that’s about as blunt and politically fired up as anything we’ve seen since ... well, since “Murphy Brown” ended its initial 10-season run in 1998.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. Two other network reboots in the past year came on almost as strong and topically on-the-nose: NBC’s “Will & Grace” arose from the dead to express its dismay at the state of the world since President Donald Trump’s 2016 election, and, like “Murphy Brown,” endeavored to personalize the events of the past year or two for gay man Will and his BFF Grace, who seethe together in snarky disgust from their seemingly elitist perch in Manhattan. Thriving off its resistance energy, “Will & Grace” almost seamlessly rediscovered its essential humor, building up from its politics rather than getting mired in them.
Contrast that to ABC’s “Roseanne” debacle, an admirable concept (portraying an old friend in the Midwest who, in the years since we last saw her, became an ambivalent Trump supporter), but which lacked the courage of its convictions and was sandbagged by bizarrely racist tweets of its unpredictable star. We’re left now with a different show (“The Conners”) premiering next month, in which her family — vis-a-vis the show’s writers — may or may not ever speak of her (or American politics) again.
Compared with “Roseanne,” “Murphy” succeeds simply by being more of what it originally was: fast, sharp and unwaveringly pointed. Candice Bergen plays a noticeably older though no less feisty Murphy — retired and still living in her Washington, D.C., townhouse (the work there is now complete, RIP Eldin) and so tormented by current politics that she agrees to come back to television, this time as the host of a new cable news show called “Murphy in the Morning” (a la MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”).
“There is such insanity out there that I became a nut job yelling at the TV,” Murphy says. “I’d rather be on TV, yelling out.”
Murphy’s son, Avery Brown (Jake McDorman), shows up from New York with similar good news: At the tender age of 28 (although my math says he should be 26 and McDorman, for what it’s worth, is 32), Avery has been offered a job hosting a morning show at the right-leaning Wolf Network — in direct competition with his mother.
“The Wolf Network?” Murphy asks, astonished. “Where the male anchors are conspiracy theorists and the women are dead behind the eyes?”
“I think I can have a real impact over there,” Avery replies. “I can change (their) culture and be the voice of reason.”
“Yeah,” Murphy cracks. “And the Earth is flat. That’s what they think over there.”
But Avery wants to feature everyday Americans on his show and hear what they think, in a civilized way.
Like they never left
In case you’ve forgotten, Avery is the baby boy Murphy had as a single mother in 1992 — an event which caused the nation’s real-life vice president, Dan Quayle, whom no one would have ever described as culturally savvy, to bemoan the decline of responsible fatherhood in America. A pre-Twitter version of a raging firestorm soon followed, and it’s a backstory that makes things all the richer now, seeing Avery wind up at a Fox News-analogue.
Murphy decides that she can’t do her new show without her old colleagues from the “FYI” newsmagazine days. Frank Fontana (Joe Regalbuto) and Corky Sherwood (Faith Ford) are as eager for new work as Murphy, but producer Miles Silverberg (Grant Shaud) is a wreck, comically holed up in his Watergate apartment, still scarred from his recent experiences as producer of “The View.”
Yet even Miles comes around to Murphy’s desire to deliver a cablenews show that prefers fact to rumor and research to punditry — a noble aim that quickly crumbles the second Murphy surrenders her ancient flip-phone for a smartphone and acquires a Twitter account.
And so, aside from the pleasing addition of Tyne Daly as Phyllis (the sister of dearly departed Phil, she’s now the barkeep of the show’s watering hole) and a surprisingly lazy caricature in the form of Pat Patel (Nik Dodani), who is “Murphy in the Morning’s” obnoxiously millennial techie and social-network producer (why can’t Avery shoulder some of Pat’s cheap, generational stereotypes — if there need to be any at all?), things proceed as if “Murphy Brown” had never gone off the air.
Though their punchlines can often be spotted long before arrival, Bergen and her co-stars haven’t lost much in terms of timing and fleetness. In the weeks to come, Murphy will sneak into the White House briefing room to lecture Sarah Huckabee Sanders on withholding information and facts from the people, which Sanders (in a form cobbled together from actual news footage) deems an “inappropriate” outburst.
“If you really want to talk about what’s inappropriate, how about the way you do your job?” Murphy demands.
Murphy implores the other reporters to get up and walk out with her in protest.
None of them do, and it’s a welcome sign that English, Bergen and company still grasp the satirical line between scathing and saturating. Murphy, after all, is trying to have things both ways — championing journalistic values while descending into diatribes that more or less echo the MSNBC lineup. One way “Murphy Brown” worked then and still works now is when Murphy experiences those moments where she knows she’s right, but also discovers she’s got an important part of the story wrong.