Murphy Brown, which returns tonight to CBS, debuted in 1988 three weeks after the other sitcom sensation of that year—Roseanne, its polar opposite. Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) was a high-flying singleton TV news icon living in a Georgetown manse perpetually under renovation. Roseanne was the matriarch of a struggling working-class family in the Midwest. Murphy Brown featured what might be called name-drop humor, its jokes usually concluding with a punch line involving a then-famous Washington grandee or two, kind of like this: “The last time I laughed that hard was when Sam Donaldson did the kazatsky at Joe Lieberman’s wedding!”
Now it’s back, only six months after Roseanne debuted to precedent-busting ratings and a fresh perspective in 2018—the perspective of the Trump voter. And once again Murphy Brown is Roseanne’s polar opposite, only this time due to ideology rather than class. While the new Roseanne blended nostalgia with something unexpectedly fresh—until its star destroyed her revived career with disgusting tweets and snuffed out her own reanimated sitcom—the new Murphy Brown proves to be just the same-old same-old, a mouthpiece for liberal Hollywood pretending to be liberal Washington.
And with the same-old joke structure: “Don’t tell me,” Murphy responds when someone says something surprising happened. “Paul Ryan’s finally taken a stand on something?” Her old colleague Jim Dial, who has left the news business, “had the right idea: Buy a boat, sail away, forget you ever heard the name Hannity.” I can maybe imagine Jennifer Rubin giggling here at the confirmation of her priors, but anyone else?
The septuagenarian Murphy is simply Samantha Bee for the AARP, complete with the humorless lectures. You’ve never seen anything quite so witless as Bergen attacking a Steve Bannon stand-in (David Costabile) at a bar, with the faux Bannon simply sputtering impotently as she calls him (wait for it) a dinosaur. “You’d better hurry,” she cries as he flees her presence and the studio audience (or canned laughter, more likely) erupts in cheers, “Jurassic Park closes in an hour!” I’m no Bannon fan, but I think he’d be able to deliver a retort.
The first new episode begins with the retired Murphy expressing her horror on Election Night 2016, marching on Inaugural Weekend, and returning to television in order to combat the “fake news” movement. Series creator Diane English doesn’t even want to pretend Murphy Brown is anything but . . . Diane English. In that sense, the new Murphy Brown is inadvertently honest about the nature of the 2018 news business in a way it surely doesn’t understand it’s being.
The dramatic situation the sitcom presents is that Murphy’s new show is in competition with another new show on the “Wolf Network” (get it—the Wolf Network? See, because a wolf is kind of like a fox). That show’s anchor is her son, Avery. But of course Avery couldn’t possibly actually be Trumpy himself. No, he’s gone on Fo—I mean, Wolf in order to straighten things out there. So there will be no conflict—conflict being the essence of comedy. There will be no political arguments that aren’t stacked so that the person on the other side is anything but impotent.
And here’s the thing. If you want denunciations of Trump and Republicans, you’ve got so many options, why would you take this one? You could watch Samantha Bee herself. Or Stephen Colbert. Or Jimmy Kimmel. Or John Oliver. Or MSNBC. Any second of any of these is more interesting.
Demographically, the show makes no sense. And what is the commercial argument for bringing Murphy Brown back anyway, except that people who liked it 25 years ago would want to revisit it now? Well, what if those people are now 72, like Candice Bergen? CBS is basically the old white person’s network, and its crime procedurals are among the shows Trump voters are most likely to watch. According to the 2016 exit polls, white people over the age of 45 voted for Trump about 60-40, and CBS’s audience is disproportionately within that 60 percent. The numbers suggest the audience CBS wants to hug Murphy Brown to its bosom would prefer to watch the Wolf Network instead.
