MURPHY BROWN REBOOT

  They’re putting Murphy Brown on the air again. 

  Try to imagine me saying this with a melancholy thespian lilt, a la Kate Hepburn’s immortal soliloquy “the calla lilies are in bloom again,” from the mostly magnificent film Stage Door. (That cross reference seems appropriate, as the movie  was an odd hybrid of wisecracking women and corny sentiment.) 

  And when I say they’re putting it on the air again, I’m not sure what that even means at this point. My television set, which to me appears large until I visit other people’s homes and walk past screens bigger than some I paid to stare at in art house theaters back when DC had art house theatergoers, is less and less like a TV and more and more like a big iPhone with only one app. And these days when I’m watching a TV show, it’s often on my actual phone, which reduces Citizen Kane and 2001 to the size of a Bazooka Joe comic. Among other concerns, I’m not sure what “channel” the reboot will be booted on, or even if channel is the correct word these days. Will they run it on the Stoner Network, and will Murphy’s assistant thus be portrayed by a bearded Baby Huey-esque rapper-slash-chef with a bong the size of Univac? Will Murphy weigh in hilariously on current events, allowing us the delicious pleasure of hearing Candice trying to mine the #metoo movement and Steve Bannon for yuks? Will Dan Quayle be stuntcast, grimly enduring potato jokes in order to crosspromote his new reality show, Epic Quayle? 

  Allow me to remind you— the 90s are a foreign country; they do things differently there.

   It was a clocktick before End Times for the network sitcom, only we didn’t realize it then. That meant that a sitcom could be culturally significant, even if it wasn’t very good. And usually, it wasn’t. 

  Cultural significance, like the flu, affected different programs in different ways. Sometimes, as with the embattled Ellen DeGeneres vehicle, an excellent show was scuttled by America’s pearlclutching over her owning up to a case of gayness. A few minutes later, a much less inventive show supersized the gay quotient and made a trillion dollars, and nowadays a white woman sitcom character can literally fuck a naked black man while FaceTiming her friend and professional evangelical denouncers don’t even notice. 

  And while Elaine Benes was gradually teaching us that a woman character could get laughs without the aid of Gorgonlike dialogue delivery, other sitcom gals were positioning themselves at various points along the Bea Arthur curve. Actresses like Roseanne, Cybil Shepherd, and Eddie Vedder were regularly projecting the ham with a level of shrillness no longer required by the limitations of audio reinforcement technology, and for the benefit of hearing-impaired older viewers who didn’t know how to enable the closed caption function on their confusing new remotes, these ladies worked their facial muscles with a vigor that would have elicited a respectful whistle from Jerry Lewis. At one point in the decade, an emissary from NASA was dispatched to a meeting with network executives, where he begged them to never put Cybill Shepherd and Roseanne on a show together, lest the ensuing mugfest throw off the meticulously planned trajectories of low-altitude satellites. 

  Thus, Murphy Brown. 

  Candice Bergen’s career had been low on octane since her wonderful performance in Carnal Knowlege. She now proceeded to develop a kind of high beam deadpan comedy wallop, which has served her loyally ever since. The dustup over Murphy’s pregnant-while-husbandless arc seems quaint in an era where a President’s Shark Week dalliance with a porn star barely makes the news, but there it is. The show was a big deal at the time. 

  To prepare for this piece, I watched a hat trick of reruns from the period, with an episode of Murphy sandwiched between Wings and Becker. It may strike some as churlish to suggest that these slices of a distant decade are dated, but I speak as one who still finds Sgt. Bilko fresh, and has yet to tire of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. In this 90s nostalgia context, Wings felt like a simpering holdover from the even more awful 80s sitcom crop, and Becker seemed a harbinger of our current landscape, a sort of Ur-mudgeon presaging the curmudgeons who roam free on our devices nowadays, whenever we can get our wi-fi to work.