All the white ladies, from Hillary Clinton to Diane English to Candice Bergen and the fictional Murphy Brown, living in a past only they recall fondly and refusing to confront the realities of the present.
When Dan Quayle castigated a fictional single woman, Murphy Brown, for daring to bear a child without marrying the father in 1992, it seemed like second-wave feminism had found both its hero and a suitable villain.
That particular and particularly bizarre event took place in an election year. The presidency would go to a Democrat, and it could be argued that the controversy over Quayle’s comments and the resulting backlash contributed to a Republican loss. And if the idea that a kerfuffle over a woman who did not actually exist could take on such proportions seems strange, it’s because it’s hard for increasingly larger numbers of people to remember that before social media and online publishing, there were only three major networks and people got their news from actual newspapers: it would be four more years before The New York Times went online.
Vox’s Todd VanDerWerf reminds us that Murphy Brown, a show about a driven and ambitious news reporter who also happened to be a woman, was part of a different television landscape: “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.” Each of those looked at different aspects of what it meant to be a woman at the time: Golden Girls was about how women dealt with—and resisted—old ideas of what “old” meant for women, Designing Women looked at women juggling work and life, and Roseanne remains the best representation of working class women on television.
Roseanne was rebooted earlier this year. That reboot has by now been wiped out of existence, all traces removed, after controversial and deeply racist comments by the show’s creator and star, Roseanne Barr. Another reboot, of Will and Grace, continues.
Reboots are very 2017. The election of Trump has given media executives a glimmer of hope in a deeply competitive market as they realise that all the talk of “resistance” to Trump could easily be tapped to create shows that simply address the zeitgeist. In an era that, like the current President of the United States, seems to have come straight out of reality television, everyday life itself is made for TV.
In this context, Roseanne was the most interesting reboot. Where Will and Grace relies on a shrill nostalgia, Roseanne, while not perfect, was far more willing to take on the challenges of the current moment than it has been given credit for so far, with its characters, buffeted by a series of economic crises that left them among the most vulnerable, having morphed into Trump-loving xenophobes. What could have been a chance for us to think through some hard questions that challenge set ideas about right and left has now been disappeared.
The reboot of Murphy Brown, in contrast, comes to us like a comedic Jurassic Park experiment brought to life. The premise, which came to creator Diane English after the election, is that Murphy Brown, the reporter on the ’90s fictional news show FYI, played by Candice Bergen, is exactly what’s needed for this current moment. In an interview with the New York Times, both English and Bergen, a co-executive producer of the reboot, are comfortable with their contempt for Trump’s voters with English saying, “They’re not going to watch us anyway…I don’t think we’re looking to bring them into the tent.” As the Times puts it in the piece titled “‘Murphy Brown Returns to Fight New Culture Wars,” the show “will be anti-Trump and decidedly pro-press.”
In the reboot, which premiered on September 27, Murphy Brown is jolted out of retirement after the 2016 elections, and regroups her old pals from the 1990s, this time with an early-morning show titled “Murphy in the Morning.” Newer cast members are only brought in to give the show an appearance of relevance in a world and a media landscape that have vastly changed, and to update viewers on Murphy’s life so far. Her son Avery, now a thirty-something journalist in his own right, is hired by the conservative Wolf Network (the joke is in plain sight) to be its liberal commentator, further convincing Murphy that she needs to continue the work of exposing the President and the phenomenon of “fake news.”
In an explicit but failed attempt to be more inclusive (FYI’s on-air talent was all-white, and Murphy in the Morning includes nearly all the same reporters), the reboot features Nik Dodani as a younger-than-millennial Indian-American social media manager and tech wizard and Adnan Rocha as a Dreamer in the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. Casting an Indian-American as a techie may seem overplayed, and it is; Dodani’s Pat Patel is also gay, which plays well among gay audiences. Rocha’s Miguel is hammered in with every ounce of liberal outrage that the show can summon and the result is both hamfisted and racist. He is hired to work at Phil’s, the local bar at which the reporters gather regularly, and at one point jumps for cover when someone asks for ice. The joke, of course, is that the word (also an acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement) triggers him. It’s an awkwardly bad joke, and out of step with an otherwise confident character who is, in a separate episode, given a moment to demonstrate his superior knowledge of United States history to convey an equally hamfisted message: he may be undocumented and under threat of deportation, but he’s no less a real American. Black characters appear much more briefly: the stage manager is a Black man, and the network’s chief executive is a Black woman, Diana Macomber, the deeply underutilised Merle Dandridge.
As is often the case with liberal shows of this sort, the black and brown characters are given little to do beyond giving a seal of inclusivity and, when convenient, portrayed in ways that shift the responsibility of anti-racism onto their shoulders. In episode 4, it’s Diana who insists that Murphy interview Ed Shannon, a Nazi and racist whose resemblance to Steve Bannon is hard to miss (the show lacks subtlety in every aspect). In real life, which the new Murphy Brown claims to want to fix, it’s highly unlikely that a Black woman would want to give any airtime to someone like Shannon, and even if such an executive thought that was a good idea, she would have foreseen the severe backlash against her and not followed through. But in placing Diana in that position, the show gets to play a classic liberal racist card: it puts the blame and the brunt of the decision to interview Shannon on a Black woman’s shoulders, and it gets to position the very white Murphy Brown as the one who resists the racist. Diana’s Blackness is divorced from Black/African American history and community and Murphy’s whiteness is joined to the advancement of America itself: she is the Great White Hope who refuses to let a racist have airtime. Even actual Black women pale beside her anti-racism, so goes the message.
Because, of course, our hero uses her show to announce that she will not interview Shannon and, of course, later runs into him at Phil’s where, in an encounter scripted entirely to show off the verbal barbs made famous in the original Murphy Brown show, she rips into a series of insults and tells him that he is a “sad, sad, sad sad dinosaur who went extinct.” Those words, recorded by an onlooker, instantly go viral. The Resistance wins again.
As Shannon leaves in a huff, Murphy flicks imaginary dust off her jacket. That is what the show wants us to believe, that Murphy Brown is back, and is demolishing the Trump administration on our behalf. The episode ends with Murphy and Avery listening to a dance mix using her “dinosaur” bit.
But who are the real dinosaurs in the show, and in today’s political and cultural landscape? Murphy’s flicking deliberately recalls Hillary Clinton’s shoulder dust-off—and the former Secretary of State made a much buzzed about special appearance on the first episode of the reboot, playing a version of herself and making jokes about emails and having been a “secretary of a very large organisation.” English was in charge of a Clinton PAC during the 2016 election and Murphy Brown even in its heyday and despite the veneer of insurgency foisted upon it by Quayle, was hardly a bastion of left thought but always a pool of liberalism, invested in the status quo and never questioning standard liberal principles like patriotism. The problem, as Murphy Brown and her real life counterparts like Rachel Maddow see it is not with the American project of imperialism and inequality that leaves millions of lives here and elsewhere in shock and disarray, but that we simply have the wrong leaders carrying it out. As many of us on the left have pointed out, Hillary Rodham Clinton lost not because of some vast right-wing conspiracy but because a large number of voters understood that her own interests were hardly any different from those of Trump: we were asked to choose between ruling elites, not to get rid of any of them.
Murphy Brown rests upon the belief that there is such a thing as a pure press that will liberate us all. After worming her way into the daily press briefing at the White House (from which she has been banned), she lets loose with a tirade against the Trump administration and its lies, and tries to get all the other journalists in the room to walk out with her. Later, her son reminds her of her own words, that “Journalists are the only real firewall between politicians and the people they’re elected to serve.” Murphy is suitably chastised and apologises, a move that some critics see as a sign of growth and strength in her.
But Avery’s little speech is itself part of the problem, cocooned as it is in a rather smug and very Murphy Brown-esque belief that journalists are above the fray and possess magical powers to save the world when, in fact, journalism is increasingly rife with vested interests and journalists on all sides frequently occlude the truth to advance their own political agenda. For proof, look no further than The New Yorker or The New York Times, both of which regularly paint Trump as Voldemort and have beaten the Russia conspiracy to death. As NPR’s Linda Holmes points out, the Murphy Brown episodes so far “don’t seem to have learned that the world has not changed in the ways that Murphy most dislikes only because of the absence of journalists like her, but also because of the limitations of journalists like her.”
Even as a deeply liberal show, the original Murphy Brown was actually funny, for most of its run, in large part because it knew not to take itself or its lead character too seriously. It featured an ensemble cast whose members were allowed to develop their own back stories and quirks, and whose acting skills gave the show a lightness and hilarity that was enjoyable to watch. In contrast, the reboot is so obsessed with the idea of Murphy as the hero of our time and Trump as the villain that it reduces everyone else to cheerleaders.
So far, the new version of Murphy Brown has been slated for at least thirteen episodes and is already running out of steam as it struggles to establish a reason for us to watch outside its topicality. The most recent, Episode 7, revolved around a gala dinner celebrating the lifetime achievement of Jim Dial, Murphy’s journalist colleague. Not much happened, other than Miles Silverberg, Murphy’s producer, realising that Pat is gay, a revelation that is hardly earth-shattering in 2018 and makes his extreme surprise and discomfort seem vaguely quaint and mostly irritating; the episode also hints at stories about Murphy’s love life as she goes home with a judge played by John Larroquette. But to find any substance in all that, the show would have to veer off in a direction that it is completely unprepared for, given that its very birth is so deeply tied to the idea that it will be the show that tells us what real news is about, what truth itself is about, smugly convinced that it is necessary for the good of the world. Steve Peterman, a producer of the show has said, “If Hillary Clinton was elected there’d be no artistic reason for this show to be on the air…we need to do this show.”
That’s really nothing to be proud of, and it reveals what should be obvious to anyone who watches the reboot: that it has little to recommend it outside of a lot of sanctimonious, feel-good venting about Trump. The old Murphy Brown worked as well as it did because it was a part of the zeitgeist, responding to and also being affected by events as they happened at the time; the new one is led by the zeitgeist, unable to see itself as occupying anything more than explanations of and declamations against the current moment and offering nothing that is artistically original.
The most frightening truth about Trump that many on the broad left, from liberals to progressives and even leftists, don’t want to confront is that he is not a creator of the times we live in but merely a symptom. But that truth needs to be denied so that “we” might continue to believe that resisting Trump and Trump alone, in any way, will change things for the better and in that we are willing, for now, to be lectured to by an old guard. The photo illustrating the Times interview with English and Bergen is of the two of them looking sternly into the camera, two white women letting you know exactly what and how to think. They have the money of a major network behind them, and both will be fine if Murphy Brown fails to be renewed. But, in the meantime, we have to suffer through the liberal angst of the dinosaurs that continue to roam the earth and berate the rest of us for not seeing the truth: All the white ladies, from Hillary Clinton to Diane English to Candice Bergen and the fictional Murphy Brown, living in a past only they recall fondly and refusing to confront the realities of the present.
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