The new Murphy Brown wants to save the world. Here’s how that worked in the ’90s.
In their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe attempted to explain American history via a series of endlessly repeating cycles, with each one spanning between 80 and 90 years.
In Strauss and Howe’s telling, you can reduce the country’s history (and human history more generally) to an endless sequence of crises, leading to reunifications, leading to awakenings, leading to unravelings, leading to more crises.
An idea within The Fourth Turning that feels particularly resonant in 2018 is that of the Gray Champion. Taken from a famous Nathaniel Hawthorne short story (in which the ghost of an old man shows up to taunt some British soldiers in the 17th century), the Gray Champion is an older person whose interests align with a younger “hero” generation in the midst of a vast crisis, and the resulting coalition of the Great Man and the Great Generation summarily ends the crisis and saves the world. Past Gray Champions have included Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt — so, y’know, big shoes to fill.
The Fourth Turning is one of those works of pop sociology that feel incredibly convincing as you read them, until you realize just how feverishly Strauss and Howe are working to force history to conform to their thesis. But it is kind of compelling how they predicted, in 1997, that the 2010s would be another crisis period, when society would seem on the brink of utter collapse, and a Gray Champion would emerge to carry forward the hopes of a new, younger generation.
The obvious question, then, is “Who will our Gray Champion be?” Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Donald Trump? Elizabeth Warren? Ted Danson?
Well… what if it was Murphy Brown? The fictional news anchor is back on CBS for her first season of sitcom shenanigans since 1998. And sometimes it can seem as if all involved in the show believe she’s here to save the republic. Look to the East! There your Gray Champion rides, America! She is the great baby boomer liberal lion Murphy Brown!!!
I’m… not so sure I buy any of the above. But to explain why, I’ll have to go back to the beginning.
Murphy Brown, which originally ran on CBS between 1988 and 1998, was hugely significant during its era, but has mostly disappeared from the public consciousness in the two decades it’s been off the air. In its heyday, the show won 18 Emmys, including two trophies for Comedy Series and five for Lead Actress, honoring star Candice Bergen.
And when it debuted in 1988, Murphy felt like a blast of fresh air. But not because its lead was a bold and brassy woman who told it like it was and didn’t define herself via the whims of a man — TV was actually a pretty great place to be a bold and brassy woman in the late ’80s, thanks to shows like The Golden Girls, Designing Women, and Roseanne. (You could argue that things have actually gone backward in this regard just a little bit, and I probably wouldn’t disagree all that much.) No, what made the show feel so fresh was its willingness to play around with darker, richer themes, at least up to a point.
When Murphy first returns to the newsroom of the fictional TV program FYI in the series’ groundbreaking pilot (for which series creator Diane English would win an Emmy for her script), she has just completed a lengthy stay at the Betty Ford Clinic, where she was being treated for alcoholism. She’s an unrepentant work in progress who is occasionally cruel to even her best friends, demanding in her perfectionism, and unwilling to sacrifice even a tiny piece of her career for anything else.
Murphy is not alone in the annals of TV heroines in terms of her show’s willingness to risk alienating (male) audiences in the name of pursuing her character’s truth, but there are very few other characters at her level. And yet she was a very late-’80s depiction of what feminism meant, clawing out a place in the news media firmament with guts and gusto, and she would be damned if she was going to give up one iota — especially not to the younger, less bold, less brassy women trying to climb the ladder behind her.
In the first season, especially, Murphy’s brand of tough womanhood is contrasted, frequently, with the younger, cuter Corky ( Faith Ford), a beauty queen who takes a career in the news media somewhat for granted. The show doesn’t hate Corky (even if Murphy sometimes does), but it’s not hard to feel the eye roll it’s barely restraining. It’s one of TV’s earliest depictions of the clash between second- and third-wave feminism, and it’s one of the things that has aged the least well about the series.
Too often, it seems as if Murphy is less interested in changing the rules of the game to make things better for all women, and much more interested in changing the rules to make things better just for Murphy, who sees herself as the only gal with the guts to take on the men. In its best episodes, Murphy Brown interrogated this tension; in too many of them, it just took Murphy’s side. ( Alison Herman of the Ringer has much more on this.)
English was responsible for the first four seasons of Murphy Brown, including the Emmy-winning second and fourth seasons. And though the series has dated considerably, thanks to its frequent political references, English’s interest in Murphy not just as a journalist or a political figure but as a flawed and very human woman kept the show from completely falling apart, even as it frequently threatened to.
English could also write crackerjack workplace comedy, and she populated the FYI newsroom with fun characters, like Murphy-foil Corky, in-over-his-head producer Miles ( Grant Shaud), Murphy’s womanizing best friend Frank ( Joe Regalbuto), and stentorian blowhard (and occasional voice of wisdom) Jim ( Charles Kimbrough). She turned a local bar into another hangout for Murphy and company, and, in the show’s most sitcom-y conceit, had a philosophical house painter spend years painting Murphy’s house, trying to perfect his art.
Most impressively, English kept the show similar to its most obvious antecedent — the newsroom-set Mary Tyler Moore Show — without feeling like a ripoff or even an homage. Mary Tyler Moore was smaller; homier, even. It took place at a local news station, after all, and its theme song insisted that love was all around, if Mary went looking for it. Murphy Brown was more adult and more cynical, like the national news show where it was set. It didn’t have a theme song, but it played Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” all the time. Who needed love, really?
Not Murphy herself. At the end of season four — English’s last season on the show — Murphy gave birth to a baby boy and became a single mother. And then all hell broke loose.
From the first, Murphy Brown was an unabashedly liberal show, in the old ’60s sense of the word. It debuted in the waning days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and left the air in the middle of Bill Clinton’s second term, when many who leaned left had grown disillusioned with a president who had cut deals with Republicans in Congress and hadn’t delivered on some of his most progressive promises. And it dealt with all of that, occasionally memorably.
But it more often just … made fun of Republicans. Yes, the characters gave great speeches about how liberal plans could help people (often via editorial addresses delivered on FYI), but a lot of the time, a joke would be set up and set up and set up, and then the punchline would boil down to “Dan Quayle!” (Or, later in the show’s run, “Newt Gingrich!”) There was a method to this, according to English. In 2013, she wrote for the LA Times:
Quayle, George H. W. Bush’s vice president, certainly provided the show’s first four (and, again, best) seasons with plenty of material. He was the “Can you believe how dumb this guy is?” politician of his era, most famously spelling potato with an added -e, but also uttering many, many amusingly stupid quotes. As English says — fish in a barrel.
The show’s constant prodding of Quayle built to a head in Murphy Brown ’s fourth season, in which Murphy decided to continue the pregnancy she learned of in the season three finale. The whole season was spent on the sorts of issues English loved to tell stories about, where the personal and the political intersect, as Murphy genuinely weighed whether to keep the baby, then tried to figure out how to fit a baby into her life, then finally gave birth in the season four finale. (Bergen was perhaps never better than when Murphy gazed down with adoration at her infant son, at once both a new mother and still recognizable as tough, flinty Murphy Brown.)
Season four was the show’s cultural high watermark, the most-watched season out of all 10. It ended up ranking third in the year’s Nielsen rankings, behind only 60 Minutes and Roseanne, and it helped drag the entire CBS Monday-night lineup into the Nielsen top 20, with three out of the lineup’s five shows landing in the top 10. CBS, which had spent much of the ’80s struggling to escape its growing reputation as a network filled with stodgy, conservative storytelling, was only too happy to have this zeitgeist-driving, Emmy-winning program leading the way.
And then on May 19,1992 — the day after Murphy gave birth in the season four finale — Quayle pulled the fictional character into a speech about the then-recent turmoil in Los Angeles after the officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted. In a throwaway line, Quayle said, “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”
With any other show, and perhaps with any other politician, the firestorm that erupted and eventually consumed pop culture for much of the summer of 1992 would have been much smaller. But Quayle’s quote turned what was then one of TV’s biggest hits into a new front in the culture war, and the fact that Murphy Brown was so central to the zeitgeist and fond of mocking Quayle only added fuel to the fire.
Quayle claimed, after the speech, that he had never seen Murphy Brown. (The first episode he saw would be the season five premiere, which aired the following September and concluded with a fiery monologue Murphy delivered to the vice president .) And his protestation of ignorance certainly seemed to be true. He was just trying to make a pop culture reference to score a few points in a speech about something else.
But the battle lines were drawn almost immediately after Quayle’s speech in May, and the Murphy Brown team only dug them in deeper at the Emmys in August, where they took home the Comedy Series trophy. English, as she concluded her speech accepting the award, snarked: “As Murphy herself said, ‘I couldn’t possibly do a worse job raising my kid alone than the Reagans did with theirs.’”
The show was suddenly the biggest show on television, and the season five premiere was its most-watched episode, with 70 million viewers tuning in, roughly 41 percent of everybody in the US watching TV that night.
Murphy Brown would never be that big again. And the ways in which it ultimately fell apart underline why the revival season that debuts Thursday, September 27, is so disappointing.
As Murphy Brown ended its fifth season, everything seemed to be going great. Its fifth season ranked only slightly lower than its fourth in the Nielsen ratings, finishing fourth for the season overall. It was nominated for the usual passel of Emmys in the summer of 1993.
