Murphy Brown on CBS: TV Review



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Groan, if you will, to the "Original Nasty Woman" pink sweatshirt that Murphy Brown wears during her first prime time appearance since the Clinton administration, but you can not deny she deserves the title. Candice Bergen's straight and irascible television journalist was making powerful men – namely Vice President Dan Quayle – nervous even before Bill and Hillary moved to the White House. It was already safe to assume that Murphy would have supported Mrs. Clinton in 2016, and that she would scream with all the anguish of a Munch painting when her candidate lost to Donald Trump.

What CBS has revived Murphy Brown, the first of which took place on September 27th, opened with the scream of the eve of the election, preceded by a montage of clips Clinton and Trump of the election campaign, which says a lot about its target audience. It seems impossible that anyone watching this particular show needs a reminder of what it was like to live these months. But before she rushes to the 2018 Women's March (instead of a cat hat, Murphy wears a Roman centurion helmet topped with rose feathers), the creative Diane English, who wrote the episode , seems determined to activate the anger of viewers. When asked how she hopes the Trump voters will receive the show, the Englishman said, "They will not look at us" and "I do not think we were trying to take them to the tent." In 2018, Murphy Brown is the primal scream therapy for resistance.

Certainly, the English heroine – a feminist icon in the sixth sense to spot corruption, lies and egotism – is an ideal spokesperson for the indignation of the Trump era. Murphy BrownThe return to television and the return of Murphy Brown to the anchor office seem just as inevitable, and the configuration for the two returns is no more elaborate than it should be: bored after his retirement from the TV magazine FYI and eager to shine the truth in power, Murphy is designing a cable television show about beers at Phil's (now led by Phil's sister, Phyllis, performed by the great Tyne Daly) with his former colleagues. While investigative journalist Frank Fontana (Joe Regalbuto) dies in academia, Corky Sherwood (Faith Ford) has just been replaced Today & # 39; huiprogram similar to that of a younger and sexier girl. (FYIThe resident old school journalist, Jim Dial, of Charles Kimbrough, took refuge on the high seas 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for a brief beginning of episode 3.) Even their former producer, fragile and anxious, Miles Silverberg (Grant Shaud), sign reluctantly.

The new show, Murphy in the morning, comes with a millennial stereotype of walking: Pat Patel (AtypicalNik Dodani, making the most of a large character), a lovable social media specialist. It's hard to say if Pat was added in the hope of attracting an audience too young to have watched Murphy the first time or as a relief comedy for a basic audience that might well laugh at the expense of "kids of today", but it's not the only 20-something here. Murphy's son, Avery (Jake McDorman of Greek and Unlimited) grew up to become a television journalist, and he is developing a rival morning show as a "Liberal token" on the conservative Wolf network. It's a coincidence that only a sitcom network with a laughing run floats, and even though you can suspend your disbelief, Avery is so underwritten that his Pod Save America T-shirt says more about him than his intrigues. Like Eldin Bernecky, the painter of the late Robert Pastorelli's house of the original series, he exists especially to give Murphy an interlocutor at home. But Eldin was a well-trained character whose sluggish machismo made him a perfect defender. Avery could not he at least be a Bernie Bro?

Murphy is stronger when he stays in the workplace, both because veteran cast members are still so crisp and because Murphy in the morning compels the show to exchange a generic political outrage against more specific stories about the many challenges facing an information media that the president has described as "the enemy of the American people" (the show itself even openly attracts the White House). Tweets about Murphy and the counterattacks against Sarah Huckabee Sanders that make Michelle Wolf's burns sound like compliments. Although the jokes about Trump are "Facebook friends with Putin" feel borrowed from two-year-old protest signs The character of Bannon is a particularly powerful mix of humor and course on objects in the media . The characters quarrel over whether Murphy should annihilate the provocateur in an on-air interview or simply refuse to "normalize" his nativist beliefs by giving him a platform on national television.

But Murphy BrownMurphy's greatest asset has always been Murphy Brown, a unique creation for which English and Bergen deserve to be rewarded. Watching the show as a kid in the '90s, when female sitcom comedies were usually of two types – a chick and a long-suffering mother – Murphy was for me something completely new, not a woman but by her intelligent fury, based on principles. Bergen takes up this energy of the force of nature in every frame of rebirth; even in a television landscape rich in complex women, there is no one else that looks a lot like Murphy. As adaptable as she is to her new role as a resistance warrior, it is her fierce vitality that Murphy Browhis eternal call.

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