Diane English and Candice Bergen Made Feminism, Politics, and Journalism Funny
“Screw the ice cubes, Corky! You’re a woman, you gotta help me! Smother me with the pillow! Do it for sisterhood! Do it for Betty Friedan! Kill me now!”
What’s so striking about Murphy Brown is that she’s not interested in being appealing. Sure, she’s beautiful, dresses well, and works to impress her colleagues, but she’s proudly irascible, cranky, and cantankerous, demanding and taking up space regardless of how people feel about her. Murphy Brown’s creator, Diane English saw Murphy — the fictional, yet legendary, newswoman — as Mike Wallace in a dress.
Murphy Brown is the long-running sitcom about a journalist who enjoys a successful career whilst navigating a male-dominated industry. Throughout the show’s 11 seasons, Murphy is a flawed superwoman: intelligent, hard-working, loyal, but also someone who is a struggling alcoholic who carries her demons alongside her. When it premiered, the show changed the television landscape, altering what women on TV sitcoms were expected to be. In 1988, Murphy Brown made its debut on CBS, delighting audiences with the story of the title character, a woman who reveled in her belligerent behaviour.
Murphy was a new kind of television character — one who was informed by her iconic predecessor Mary Richards. Like Mary, Murphy was a woman devoted to her career and a woman who discovered that she could create a family of her friends and colleagues. And like Mary, Murphy was a character who inspired countless debates about the roles of women on television. Both Mary and Murphy found success in journalism and struggled to balance their personal lives and professional lives, often finding it difficult to comply with standards of femininity. But there is a distinct way in which Murphy deviates from Mary, no matter how influential the 70s sitcom legend is: Murphy doesn’t care to be nice. What Diane English did was build a sitcom around the saying, “well-behaved women rarely make history.”
We first met Murphy on November 14, 1988. The pilot — written by English — does a nimble job of introducing her mouthpiece. Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) returns from a stint at the Betty Ford Clinic to take her rightful place at FYI, a fictional newsmagazine, for which she’s an anchor. The show introduces Murphy to a number of characters and reunites her with her old friends. Amongst the new faces is Corky Sherwood (Faith Ford), the beautiful, former Miss America who joined the show during Murphy’s absence. Throughout the show’s early seasons, when Murphy and Corky shared a wary relationship, their diametrically-opposite approach to their work would be an important them. Murphy was the substantive pro, whilst Corky was the airy ditz (a running joke in the early seasons that was thankfully phased out had Corky report on fluff pieces like fit farms for celebrity dogs or an exposé on the real Mrs. Fields)
English is clearly inspired by The Mary Tyler Moore Show when building the fictional world of Murphy Brown. The pilot establishes that Murphy shares a long, rewarding friendship with fellow anchor, investigative reporter Frank Fontana (Jim Regalbuto) as well as a respectful rapport with the formal Jim Dial (Charles Kimbrough). Like Murphy, Jim is a composite of real-life journalists. Where Murphy is an amalgam of Barbara Walters, Gloria Steinem, and Linda Ellerbee, Jim has echoes of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather.
English masterfully created a lived-in world in a matter of a few episodes. A hallmark of the series was how she blended her fictional Washington, DC with the real Washington. Most of the references the show made — whether it was political or media — were real, ripped from the headlines. English shrewdly made Murphy seem like a real journalist by having the character interact and engage with real journalists. She was in competition with reporters like Barbara Walters, Connie Chung, or Mary Alice Williams.
With this richly-textured universe, English did something few writers thought possible: she created high farce, satire, and comedy out of topics like journalism, politics, and feminism. The humour of Murphy Brown was defined by the characters’ facing some topical issue and responding with razor-sharp wit. English, along with talented writers like Russ Woody, Steven Peterman, Gary Dontzig, Tom Seeley, Norm Gunzenhauser, among others, looked to the news to create situations that engaged with their audiences, relying on their intelligence: English wrote jokes that specifically challenged her audiences, knowing that not everyone watching TV will understand the allusions or references she makes.
Throughout the first season, we see Murphy adjust to the world with the clear vision of someone who is newly sober. Some of the changes she’s facing include being introduced to a new boss, the ticking of her biological clock, collaborating with new journalists, and dealing with her domineering mother. Though Murphy was strong, she wasn’t always up to the challenge, and what made the show strike such a profound chord was that we watched Murphy succeed and fall short, but she was funny the whole time.
Of course for those who remember the culture wars of the early 1990s, waged by conservative blowhards like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh, the most prevalent and impactful storyline of Murphy Brown was when then-Vice President Dan Quayle cited the show as an example of failing values in America.
In his speech — addressed to the Commonwealth Club in 1992 — Quayle spoke about the breakdown of the family and its effect on gang violence and poverty. The speech spoke to an agenda that the Bush administration was pushing to combat urban blight, poverty, and gang violence by promoting an agenda that encouraged the nuclear family. The speech was boilerplate, bootstraps propaganda, littered with the faded trope of ‘liberal, amoral Hollyweird’ that was particularly popular among conservative thinkers. In his speech, he namechecked Murphy Brown saying,
It doesn’t help matters when prime time 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.”
The show responded to the silly dig with a wittier, smarter answer: the two-part opener of the fifth season, 1992’s “You Say Potatoe, I Say Potato” (the title referencing the time the vice-president corrected a school kid’s correct spelling of potato). The episode was the follow-up to the fourth season finale in which Murphy gave birth to baby Avery. The fifth season was a brilliant sendup of the absurd position Quayle placed himself in as well as the ludicrous depths the culture wars reached. Murphy isn’t adapting well to the new baby, unsure of herself, and clearly overwhelmed by her situation. Instead of her usual, well-groomed appearance, Murphy is seen in dirty pajamas, her hair a mess. When Quayle’s speech implies that Murphy is glamorizing single parenthood, she whines to Frank, “Look at me, Frank. Am I glamorous?” to which he duly replies, “Of course not, you look disgusting.”
The controversy put Candice Bergen and her fictional baby on the cover of newspapers and magazines and she became part of the ongoing to-and-fro of the moral panic that gripped the national conversation.
And responding to the awful Anita Hill hearings in which Hill was thoroughly dismissed and disrespected by an all-male panel, Peter Tolan wrote: “Send in the Clowns” in which Murphy had to face a Senate hearing herself over the disclosure of classified material. Because she refused to divulge her source, she was facing arrest. The episode was a perfect encapsulation of the sexist circus that Hill was subjected to; the show ended with Murphy’s impending acquittal, but not before the episode faded to black as the fictional senators indulged in sexist jokes, shielded behind closed doors and away from the media.
Diane English left the show after its fourth season to work on her following sitcom Love & War, a comedy that starred former L.A. Law beauty Susan Dey and Murphy Brown’s Jay Thomas. The show managed three seasons (Dey was let go after the first season to be replaced by Designing Women’s Annie Potts), before being cancelled in 1995. Later that year, she reunited with Murphy Brown star Robert Pastorelli who left the show for his own show, Double Rush which only lasted a season. In 1996, she teamed up with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen for the workplace comedy Ink that also lasted one season. She returned to Murphy Brown in the show’s 10th season closer, “Never Can Say Goodbye” which was the series finale, until the one-season revival in 2018.
Meanwhile, Murphy Brown ran initially for 10 seasons. It saw characters leave the show — namely Grant Shaud, Pat Corley, Pastorelli, and Lily Tomlin joined for the final two seasons, serving as Murphy’s antagonist. As the show progressed without the guiding hand of Diane English, it suffered the inevitable fatigue that should be expected from a sitcom that was airing for 10 seasons. The show still looked to the real world to create comedy — Murphy and Corky dealt with sexual harassment, the FYI crew struggled with political correctness, and in the show’s 8th season, Murphy and the gang discovered just how expendable they are when the network looks to fire them to save money in the face of sagging ratings (again, a nod toward The Mary Tyler Moore Show which saw in its final episode all of the characters fired from their jobs, save the comically incompetent Ted Knight) The final season, like the fourth season, had a long plot arc, with Murphy being diagnosed with breast cancer, facing her mortality and living with the difficulty of dealing with a serious illness.
When looking at Murphy Brown it’s clear that Diane English is a major creative force behind the show and why it’s regarded so well. But star Candice Bergen is an essential ingredient to the show’s comedy. In 1988, Bergen was at the tail-end of an unsatisfactory film career that started in the late 1960s. Throughout the late 60s and 1970s, she was cast in a series of pallid films, often as the leading lady. Rarely compelling or interesting, Bergen was usually cast for her model-good looks. It was only during her good-natured hosting gigs on Saturday Night Live’s first season as well as her well-received comic turns in Alan Pakula’s 1970 Starting Over and George Cukor’s 1981 Rich and Famous that Bergen was given warm critical notice because she was starting her transition from leading lady to character actress and comedienne.
In Murphy Brown, English and Bergen do a marvellous job in creating a memorable character — one who is at once endearing yet rather unlikable. English, her writers, and directors worked with Bergen to find the comic actress: Bergen’s ramrod stiff carriage and dry voice was used to full effect; few could throw off a disapproving or judgmental one-liner like her. Though Bergen was largely heralded for her beauty in her youth, in the show, her looks were incidental — sometimes they were referenced, but more often, she was juxtaposed with the much-younger Corky, who would have a recurring joke of referencing Murphy’s middle age in conversation. English was able to create a character that slipped perfectly on Bergen’s screen persona, exploiting her then-underused comic talents, and in a sense, built a wholly new screen persona for the actress (one that would follow her after Murphy’s end).
In 2018, in the rush of revivals and reboots, Murphy Brown came back to CBS to act as a critique of the Trump administration. Most of the original characters returned (Pastorelli and Corley had died in the ensuing years and Kimbrough had largely retired) but the show struggled in its new TV landscape and was cancelled after a short season. Though English returned to steer the show, it didn’t generate the same comedic spark, largely unable to translate the progressive politics into comedy.
Much of the failure could be chalked up to the show’s truncated length: a mere 13 episodes (as opposed to the 24 episodes that comprised of a season in the original run). Because of the limited time, English and company had to shoehorn a season’s worth of topical comedy in about half a season: as a result, the episodes felt heavy and stuffed with political gags. What made the original show work so beautifully was that the show had time and space to braid topical episodes with lighter fare so that we saw episodes of Murphy tackling some serious issue, the writers crafting scripts inspired by real-life events, but then we also saw gentler themes that focused on Murphy’s personal life and her relationships with her friends.
Still, at its best Murphy Brown was a cracking sitcom, one that featured a powerful female lead who changed and influenced the image of women on sitcom television. After Murphy, we saw characters like Liz Lemon, Leslie Knope, Mindy Lahiri, primetime daughters of Murphy Brown, who like she, were defined not by romantic relationships or motherhood, but by their work and their friendships.
