#MurphyBrown reboot in the works next season at @CBS https://t.co/5OejnpDHD5
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) January 24, 2018
I love both Candice Bergen and her most prominent avatar as much as anyone, but isn’t it about time we stopped relying on 30-year-old arguments?
Wait, a "Murphy Brown" reboot? That's crazy. That show was from a very, very different era, back when the vice president of the United States was a vapid, regressive conservative from Indiana.
— Greg Wyshynski (@wyshynski) January 24, 2018
Can't help but wonder about the overlap between “people who melted down when Murphy Brown had a baby out of wedlock” and “people who voted for a pussy-grabbing pathological liar.”
— shauna (@goldengateblond) January 24, 2018
Trump is in the papers for being a racist clown.
The vice president is a sexist moron from Indiana.
A drug epidemic is sweeping the nation but being ignored.
And Murphy Brown is set to premiere on television.
1988 or 2018?
— Charlotte Clymer?????? (@cmclymer) January 24, 2018
something that's maybe comforting to remember when Trump is yelling at some rando celebrity on Twitter is that the George H W Bush administration managed to get into fights with Murphy Brown AND The Simpsons so we've always been this dumb.
— Michael T Sweeney (@mtsw) January 24, 2018
I suppose the bright side of Murphy Brown is that it will probably cost $500 billion less than Amazon's "Lord of the Rings: Idea A Guy Wrote On A Napkin"
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) January 24, 2018
(On the other hand, if the news makes Mike Pence melt down in public… )
zhena gogolia
I don’t see how this is going to work.
Yutsano
@zhena gogolia: Same. Murphy Brown was a very topical sort of show for the 80s. I mean I loved it but the themes presented back then are almost normal in this day and age.
zhena gogolia
@Yutsano:
And Colleen Dewhurst is dead.
Yutsano
@zhena gogolia: Why do I get the feeling this is going to be completely different thematically but they’re just going to keep the characters except a much older Candice Bergen?
Also: no Colleen? CANCEL THE WHOLE DAMN MESS!!!
Anonymous at Work
It wasn’t Bush picking those fights as much LOSING those fights.
zhena gogolia
@Yutsano:
I can’t imagine that Candice can pull off being a still-working journalist. I guess the model would be Barbara Walters or something.
NeenerNeener
@zhena gogolia: As is the guy that played Eldon, her painter.
M. Bouffant
It was bad enough when the movies became virtually all franchises & prequels/sequels, & it’s not that broadcast telebision has ever been a hotbed of originality, but we already have Will & Grace & Roseanne coming back, apparently w/ as many original cast members as possible, & now this.
Guess show biz is officially over.
Peale
It’s like those late seasons of Are You Being Served when they all move to the country to a farm. Or Laverne moves to LA with squiggy. its not likely these folks would all be at the same news network. Even the baby she had would be too old to be “cute”
zhena gogolia
@NeenerNeener:
Oh, I forgot about him, he was great!
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
…have only heard of, not watched, Murphy Brown, but who could play Black Mike Pence?
raven
Maybe they’ll redo the Magus!
ruemara
If we’re going back to 1989, I’m finally getting parachute pants.
Peale
@M. Bouffant: amazon and Netflix and Hulu and Vimeo need steaming content.
zhena gogolia
@ruemara:
I somehow never managed to get a perm, maybe now’s the time.
Baud
I hope they bring back Mr. Ed.
Mnemosyne
I honestly don’t recall watching a single episode of “Murphy Brown,” but I was in college at the time, so I don’t think I was the target audience.
I need to get the first two chapters of my novel ready for a contest and I’m kind of freaking myself out about it and thinking I may need to do a major rewrite. Ugh.
JPL
For Big Little Lies fans, Meryl Streep has signed up to be Perry’s mom. I know Alexander Skarsgård won lots of award for his portrayal, but I hate him. Does this mean that I have to hate her. btw I still can’t watch Michael Emerson after his portrayal of William Hinks on The Practice.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Andrea Mitchell is the same age as Bergen (71) and still a working journalist.
JPL
@Mnemosyne: Dan Quayle does. He was offended.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: The stable genius is in the White House.
Steeplejack
@Peale:
That’s what PørnHub is for.
Trollhattan
@Baud:
Wilburrrrrr!
Mike J
Square Pegs with emo kids.
schrodingers_cat
I remember Bergen from Gandhi, never watched Murphy Brown.
Gravenstone
@Peale: Judicious typo, there.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: An insult to Mr. Ed.
NotMax
Acquaintance worked himself up to being a Big Honcho on the original show’s production team. Shall have make a mental note to check if he’s involved in this.
Mike J
@Mike J: I am genuinely curious if kids these days self segregate based on musical preference. The very idea of an underground scene seems to mean less when top 40 is kinda dead, but on the other hand you only ever hear about same few top 40ish performers in mass media.
Roger Moore
Can somebody on TV please come up with something new for a change? How many reboots do we need?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Different stable.
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
Ooh, yeah! And “My Mother the Car”! I loved that show. Seriously.
zhena gogolia
@JPL:
That was so creepy.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack:
Depends how you define “working.”
Hungry Joe
@Steeplejack: All right — this has to be done, and since none of you guys are stepping up, I guess I will:
Re Andrea Mitchell / “working journalist”: You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
dr. luba
@Peale:
Murphy Brown was about a 60 Minutes type of show. Did anyone ever retire from 60M, or do they all die in harness? (I ask becasue I quit watching decades ago.)
B.B.A.
@dr. luba: Charlie Rose was involuntarily retired. I don’t think that counts.
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: Hollywood seems to have the same problem, sequels, prequels and comic books are what seem to make the big bucks. I went to see the latest Star Wars installment because of all the hype it was getting. I was bored out of my mind. Mind numbing action without a pause, or any emotional impact on the participants.
NotMax
Sample of precursor to the “new normal” on the original Murphy Brown.
(No, not the clip with Wallace Shawn which have linked to previously.)
D Myer
Old people don’t count unless they are support systems for younger people!
efgoldman
@Peale:
Does this mean the new psycho FCC head wants to be able to have content control?
Yarrow
LOL.
efgoldman
@Steeplejack:
For some unusual definitions of “journaliast”
ruemara
@zhena gogolia: Why not, humanity’s gone insane. We should all perm and wear neon.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Will admit to watching it because am a sucker for anything with Ann Sothern. Even though only her voice was used.
Remember the car was a Pierce-Arrow; don’t recall what year the model was.
efgoldman
@D Myer:
The curb I’ve been kicked to, it hurts.
And I can too, look: one… two…. six….
Kathleen
@zhena gogolia: I still have clothes from the 80’s in my closet. Time to busta shoulder pad!
zhena gogolia
@NotMax:
You can’t go wrong with Ann Sothern.
Kathleen
@JPL: I just got hooked on that series and spent a Sunday binge watching. Powerful performances. I just saw Streep and Kidman in The Hours and was blown away. Look forward to see them paired again!
NotMax
FYI.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat: I loved the show in the 80’s but I’m not sure a reboot will work. My Gen X daughter OTOH expressed delight on Twitter which kind of surprised me.
Kathleen
@Steeplejack: I consider her a “presenter”, not a “journalist”.
No Drought No More
I once thought Dan Quayle was as Indiana batshit crazy as they possibly came, until I got to know Mike Pence. “Oh my my, oh hell yes..”.
Also: I’m reading the Year of Decision by Bernard DeVoto. The following passage describes the forebodings of two well known New Englanders in January of 1846 concerning the nation’s future. Longfellow had written a “poet’s premonition” four years before, and had repeated it in conversation with his friend. Their prescience was profound:
“There is a poor, blind Samson in this land,
Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
Till the vast temple of our liberties
A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies”.
[DeVoto]: Walking to Boston with Longfellow, hoping to lighten his dull mood, James Russell Lowell felt the pillars of the Commonweal begin to shake. It was a literary achievement of [President] Polk’s election that it had stiffened a dilettante into a serious writer. Lowell had written when the democrats triumphed:
“Careless seems the Great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future and, behind the dim Unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own”.
efgoldman
@NotMax:
Surely you’re not surprised. Every fucking thing he touches or has touched turns to shit.
ThresherK
If they have an episode about White Liberal Guilt, this time can they refrain from using “White Liberal Guilt” as actual dialogue?
Mnemosyne
@D Myer:
Maybe our ideal should not be that people have to work until they die, even if the job is a glamorous one like journalism.
lgerard
Wake me up when they bring back Alf
chris
@ruemara: Gotta be better than the “Casual Corduroy Harem Pants” I saw in ad on this very blog.
Mnemosyne
@Kathleen:
I think it was Comedy Central that once had a commercial with a woman who was excited that her yellow power suit from the 80s still fit, except that she had to go through the metal detector sideways because of how wide the shoulder pads were. ?
Some Guy, Helvering
Word is Trump has picked the next IRS Commissioner, a Beverly Hills tax attorney:
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/370420-trump-to-tap-tax-lawyer-as-next-irs-commissioner-report
From his profile page at his firm:
Chuck Rettig is listed by Chambers USA as the only Eminent Practitioner in the Chambers Category “Tax: Fraud – Nationwide.”
Hmm. You wonder how Trump found him.
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: I am pretty sure we will see a decline in international students for the 2018 academic year.
NotMax
Nothing to sneeze at. So much winning, chapter 9,673.
joel hanes
@Hungry Joe:
Thank you.
SiubhanDuinne
@zhena gogolia:
I cried when it happened, I’m crying again now. Absolutely loved her!
(Trivia: Dewhurst’s film debut was as an inmate in a mental asylum in the 1959 Audrey Hepburn vehicle The Nun’s Story.)
Baud
@NotMax: Obama isn’t the president anymore. No one cares.
geg6
I loved Murphy Brown. And Designing Women. Linda Bloodworth Thomason owned comedy then like Shonda Rhimes owns melodrama today.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
I hope they bring back Life With Elizabeth. Betty White, represent!
Shana
And they’ll never be able to update Jim Dial’s righteous rant about the service at the shoe department of Hecht’s a long gone DC area department store.
NotMax
@Baud
Huh? Say what now? (Frantically looks up Rod Serling’s phone number.)
;)
M. Bouffant
@Peale: Every one needs “steaming content”.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Fortunately, Leave It to
BeaverJared was a no-go.Baud
@NotMax: Heh.
Booger
@Steeplejack: LOL! You slay me!
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Dewhurst went to zg’s alma mater – as did her two sons.
Gin & Tonic
@Kathleen:
I bet two-thirds of the dudes on here will read that and say “so?”
Redshift
@Roger Moore:
Come on, there’s more new stuff and more good stuff these days than at any time in my life. Im not going to begrudge them the nostalgia buffs they’re trying to grab.
Over the weekend, I watched Counterpart, the new SF spy series with JK Simmons, and an episode of Electric Dreams, the Philip K. Dick anthology series, and they were both excellent.
Redshift
@Baud:
Well, duh. That’s why the Hillary Clinton administration is obviously to blame.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus:
and you
Mike in NC
Never watched Murphy Brown but as a 12 year old I was smitten by Candace Bergen in The Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen.
NotMax
@Redshift
Tried, really tried, to find something – anything – in Electric Dreams to justify the time elapsed while watching, and couldn’t. Decidedly meh.
Friend who writes scripts and science fiction for a living called me up last week (hadn’t heard from him in more than a year) specifically to grumble about the series.
YMMV.
Steeplejack
@Kathleen:
She is on the Mideast trip with Mike Pence right now, “reporting,” not “presenting.”
Baud
Was this discussed?
https://medium.com/@TheDemocrats/dnc-announces-state-party-innovation-fund-recipients-75aeb61e240e
SFAW
@NeenerNeener:
Robert Pastorelli.
And Pat Corley’s gone, unfortunately.
Re: My Mother the Car: too late for that, I’m afraid.
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: And me.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia, @Hungry Joe, @efgoldman:
Fuck all of you guys. I report; you decide.
And I don’t remember Murphy Brown working all that hard either. She sure had a lot of time to dick around pointlessly with her painter, her relatives, her coworkers, etc.
Ruckus
@Mike J:
Top 40 isn’t dead. There is a radio station in every major market that plays the same shitty top 40 songs, from 30-40 yrs ago, over and over and over and over and over and…… every day of the year. I know, that’s what is on at work. Which is why I wish it was dead. But it isn’t. It’s not even on life support.
NotMax
@Baud
The good: the grants.
The bad: “incentivizes.” Ugh. Not unlike being gagized with a spoon.
Schlemazel
@Steeplejack:
Well, working, yes but I disagree with the rest of your description
@zhena gogolia:
Yes, on second thought I’d go with “employed” the rest of it is all wrong
Kathleen
@zhena gogolia: I adore Ann Sothern.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@zhena gogolia: I have fond memories of it too. Jerry Van Dyke famously turned down a much more popular sitcom to do it. I forget which.
Crap. In looking up Van Dyke, I find he died this month.
Anyway, Wikipedia says he was offered the role of Gilligan, and also the Don Knotts part on Andy Griffith
Baud
@NotMax: Kind of undermines the whole effort.
Kathleen
@Mnemosyne: Ha! I still do love those shoulder pads though!
Gravenstone
Jesus. Per Maddow, Manafort’s legal team apparently accidentally attached and uploaded their fucking case notes to a now published court submission.
Mike J
@Ruckus: That’s an oldies station, not top 40.
D Myer
@Mnemosyne: Agreed. That’s the last thing I meant to suggest. Indeed we all have a shelf life, then we’re “kicked to the curb,” where we belong.
Kathleen
@SiubhanDuinne: YES!!!! Remember her driving her convertible?
ETA Even though I was still in the womb throughout the run of the show…
Schlemazel
@NotMax:
The car was a bunch of old parts tossed together, not a real thing. I remember they claimed it was a 1928 Porter (must have been in the theme song because when I hear it in my head it is set to music)
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Yutsano: One episode I remember fondly is when the team goes to a team-building retreat. I suspect that one is timeless in the jokes.
Team building and trust exercises are still a thing, right?
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
LOL. Also too, OMG.
Baud
@Gravenstone: Hahaha.
zhena gogolia
@Gravenstone:
The whole thing is the trial of Tim Heidecker, I keep saying.
john fremont
@M. Bouffant: They need to give Cop Rock another chance. That show was original!
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Thing is most of the old line “journalists” and “news entertainers” don’t come close to needing the money, like say a janitor would. Well except that they have to keep up the payments on the botox, tummy tucks and assorted age enhancing bullshit they do. And a few need to keep up on their liquor store payments, there would be hell to pay if they got that supply cut off.
dr. luba
@B.B.A.: And Morley Safer and Mike Wallace worked there well into their dotage. They keep getting more and more correspondents, as few seem to leave…..
zhena gogolia
@john fremont:
I loved it. Anything with Peter Onorati.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Gravenstone: I went out to dinner after hell broke out three or four times this afternoon, and Maddow is reporting hell broke out two or three more times while I was out.
Trump’s attorneys are walking back his pledge to testify under oath
raven
@Schlemazel:
Ruckus
@Mike J:
No it’s not. It was a top 40 station decades ago and it still has exactly the same fucking playlist. It wasn’t horrible the first 5000 times, but the decades have not been kind.
Gin & Tonic
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ve seen purportedly intelligent people on TV saying that if he simply ignored any Mueller subpoena, or pled the 5th, there’d be hell to pay, politically. By now I’ve come to believe that he could wipe his ample ass with the subpoena with no political consequences. He was right: he could shoot somebody and not lose any support.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Schlemazel
If they want reboots I’d vote for Night Court, Cheers, either of the Newhart shows, Barney Miller, WKRP, Taxi. Now, none of them could be carried by their original cast but I would love to see writing that good on TV again.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Schlemazel: they ought to do this in some kind of update-of-the-week format. It would be interesting to see what different writers/producers could come up with. Some sincere, some farcical.
I loved WKRP, but with both Mr Carlson and Les Nessman (four time winner of the Buckeye Newshawk Award, and a coveted Silver Sow) gone to their reward…
NotMax
@Schlemazel
No one remembers the blink and you’ll miss it short-lived third series, Bob.
Schlemazel
@raven:
yup, that was pretty much what I remembered. A quick search shows it was in the opener so that explains the song I hear when I say “1928 Porter”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vOxPUFF0T0
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
I recently recalled an old Mary Tyler Moore episode in which Ted Baxter is running for some award and to up his favorables, he prays on the air. Lou Grant goes nuts and Mary has to get between him and Ted and tactfully explain to Ted that he shouldn’t pray on the air. It was treated as a funny moment. Can you imagine a show today treating praying that way no matter where it happened?
Schlemazel
@NotMax:
I even remember that he road a toy train off stage.
Mike J
@Ruckus: By definition, if the songs they play are not in the top 40, they aren’t a top 40 station. If those songs are over 20 (10? 30?) years old, it’s an oldies station. Even if they don’t act like it.
Schlemazel
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
What ever happened to Harry Anderson? Selma Diamond is gone but Moll and Marsha Warfield and the other are going strong. But, like I said, they would need to be recast for most of these
NotMax
@Schlemazel
There’s writing as sharp today. It’s just that one now has to search beyond the over the air broadcasters to find a lot of it.
Schlemazel
@NotMax:
There is a lot of good writing but most of it is not doing sitcoms.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I hadn’t seen that before. I have to say I am liking the new DNC I have been seeing of the past couple of months.
Groucho48
@schrodingers_cat:
She was very good in Sand Pebbles and okay but condescending to Ghandi in that movie.
That’s about all I’ve seen her in. I probably caught parts of Murphy Brown, but, was working evenings at the time, so didn’t see much TV
Shana
@Schlemazel: Or Frank’s Place. Loved that show. I gather the reason it’s never been rerun is problems with the rights for the music they used.
zhena gogolia
@Groucho48:
She’s great in Starting Over with Burt Reynolds.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
I’ve never seen Murphy Brown (it’s never on ME TV), but I love her performance opposite Steve McQueen in “The Sand Pebbles”
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@Groucho48: but then again, she was playing Margaret Bourke-White, who was a real life person, who probably was condescending.
NotMax
@David Merry Christmas Koch
Doubt it’s the cable company, as it is the only channel where it happens so I attribute it to the originating signal, but my soundbar refuses to acknowledge that ME TV contains audio.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@NotMax: don’t know, but perhaps its because their shows are all mono while today’s shows are all stereo. maybe the soundbar only processes stereo.
Steeplejack
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
Murphy Brown is on Antenna TV, another third-tier bottom-feeder channel, if you have that on your system. In fact, it’s on right now. Coming up: Becker and Coach.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@NotMax: A lot, but not all. Arrested Development and Community aired an awful lot of their best episodes on network television, to name probably my favourite two examples. Modern Family isn’t as consistently sharp as it used to be, but it still has its moments.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
MeTV is on my shit list because about four months ago they preëmptively zoomed all their shows up to widescreen aspect ratio. Really irritating for Perry Mason—my daily beacon of truth and justice in the ongoing Trump nightmare—and other oldie shows.
schrodingers_cat
@Groucho48: I am not a huge fan of that movie. She looked nice, though!
SFAW
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Umm, unless he’s died in the last 24 hours, Richard Sanders is still on this side of the grass.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@SFAW: LET THE UPDATE BEGIN!
Librarian
@Ruckus: I believe the point that Mike J was making was that current top 40, with current songs, is dead.
Mike E
That episode with Paul Reubens as her secretary…lulz
efgoldman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
At the time i was in radio. I knew all the characters as archetypes of real people.
Groucho48
If we are going to bring back a “liberal” show, it should be Maude, with a character at least as acerbic as Bea Arthur and she should get an abortion around episode 6.
agorabum
They forgot one on the list:
President has dementia
Trump is in the papers for being a racist clown.
The vice president is a sexist moron from Indiana.
A drug epidemic is sweeping the nation but being ignored.
And Murphy Brown is set to premiere on television.
1988 or 2018?
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@Groucho48: atleast bring back someone with bazoongas as nice as Adrienne Barbeau’s