"Murphy Brown" is a welcome sight, even if his indignation is too much on the nose

Does the invisible hand that guides the universe also keep the remote firmly?

How else can we explain the sudden and welcome return of "Murphy Brown" on television the same day that a woman has to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee and tell how an ultraconservative candidate of the Supreme Court attacked her more than thirty years ago? ? No one could have predicted this convergence of pop culture, feminism, and the fate of the judicial branch, yet we are strolling through a newsroom, sitcom memories, and funhouse mirrors. What year is it? What planet is it?

I do not know anymore, but what I can tell you is that Murphy's return is as reassuring and entertaining as it is timely. The series, which returns to CBS on Thursday with great anticipation (and, certainly, deserved), brilliantly exploits feminist anger and the frustrations of modern media from both its main character and its creator, Diane English. shot like everything we've seen since. . . Well, since "Murphy Brown" finished his first series of 10 seasons in 1998.

In fact, it is not quite true. Two more network reboots over the past year have been almost as powerful and topical: NBC's "Will & Grace" has come out of the dead to express dismay at the state of the world since President Trump's 2016 elections . "Murphy Brown" has been trying to personalize the events of the year or the last two years for gay man Will and his friend BFF Grace, who mingle disgustingly at their seemingly elitist roost in Manhattan. By taking advantage of his resistance energy, "Will & Grace" has almost unceasingly rediscovered his essential humor, relying on his policy rather than sinking into it.

This contrasts with ABC's "Roseanne" debacle, an admirable concept (portraying an old Midwestern friend who, in recent years, has become an ambiguous supporter of Trump), but who has not had the courage of his beliefs bizarrely racist tweets from his unpredictable star. We are now with another show ("The Conners") that will be aired next month, in which his family – vis-à-vis the writers of the series – might or might not talk about it (or the politics American).

[‘Murphy Brown’ once sparked a feud with Dan Quayle. Now the reboot is courting one with Trump.]

Compared to "Roseanne", "Murphy" simply manages to be more than she was at the beginning: fast, sharp and resolutely sharp. Candice Bergen plays an older Murphy, but no less fiery – retired and still living in her Washington home (work is now over, RIP Eldin) and so tormented by current politics that she agrees to return to television, this time host of a new cable news show titled "Murphy in the Morning" ("Morning Joe" at MSNBC).

"There's such craziness out there that I've become a big job screaming at television, "says Murphy. "I would prefer sure TV scream outside."

Murphy's son, Avery Brown (Jake McDorman), arrives in New York with good news: at the age of 28 (although my calculations indicate that he should be 26 years old and McDorman, for what it's worth, 32 years old), Avery was offered a job by organizing a morning show at the Wolf Network, which was on the right, in direct competition with his mother.

"The network of wolves?" Asks Murphy, surprised. "Where male anchors are conspiracy theorists and women are dead behind the eyes?"

"I think I can have a real impact there," Avery answers. "I can change [their] culture and be the voice of reason. "

"Yeah," Murphy snaps. "And the earth is flat. That's what they think there.

But Avery wants to portray ordinary Americans on his show and hear what they think, in a civilized way – people who, he says, "drive pickup trucks and have children in the army and keep their coupons and go to school." Sunday church. They deserve a voice.

"They have one," says Murphy. "He's orange, lives in the oval office and is Facebook friends with Putin."

In case you forgot, Avery is the little boy Murphy had as a single mother in 1992 – an event that displeased the vice president of the nation, Dan Quayle, that no one would ever have described as decline of responsible fatherhood in America. A pre-Twitter version of a raging fire storm soon followed, and it's a story that makes things even richer when Avery finds himself in a Fox News analogue.

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Murphy decides she can not do her new show without her former colleagues on the FYI TV news. Frank Fontana (Joe Regalbuto) and Corky Sherwood (Faith Ford) are as eager to work as Murphy, but producer Miles Silverberg (Grant Shaud) is a comical wreck in his Watergate apartment, still marked by his recent experiences as a producer. from "the view".

Yet even Miles is getting closer to Murphy's willingness to air a newscast that favors rumors and hacking research – a noble goal that quickly collapses when Murphy abandons his old mobile phone for a smartphone and acquires a twitter account. Almost right away, she tweets about her longtime date with Trump. Soon, he kisses her in real time during the show. The ratings pass through the roof and Murphy participated in the kind of anti-journalistic noise and nonsense that she deplores.

And so, apart from the pleasing addition of Tyne Daly as Phyllis (Phil's sister very dead, she is now the shepherd of the show) and a surprisingly lazy caricature in the form of Pat Patel (Nik Dodani) Murphy, an odious millennia-old social technician and social network producer (why can not Avery endure some of the inexpensive generational stereotypes of Pat – do we have to?), Things go as if "Murphy Brown" is Had never gone out of the air.

Although their perforations can often be spotted long before their arrival, Bergen and his co-stars have not lost much time and fleet. In the coming weeks, Murphy will visit the White House information room to give a talk to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, press secretary, about the concealment of information and facts to the public. .

"If you really want to talk about what is inappropriate, how about how you do your job? "The role of the White House press secretary is to create transparency in the government and tell the truth to the Americans, but that's not what's happening in this room. Whether it's a meeting with Russians at Trump Tower or an invented warrant that requires separation between parents and children at the border, it all boils down to the same thing, so here's my question: Why are you lying?

Mic dropped, Murphy implores the other reporters to get up and go out with her to protest.

None of them do, and it's a welcome sign that English, Bergen and society are still grasping the satirical line between scorching and saturating. After all, Murphy is trying to get things back and forth – defending journalistic values ​​while descending into diatribes that more or less echo last night's MSNBC programming. One of the ways that Murphy Brown has worked and still works now is when Murphy experiences those moments when she knows she's right, but also discovers that she's a big part of the story.

Murphy Brown (35 minutes) premieres Thursday at 9:30 pm on CBS.