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The 20th Century Called … And They Have the TV Remote
Ventriloquist Edgar Bergen with daughter Candice on The Charlie McCarthy Show 1952 (Photo: CBS)
CBS announced on Wednesday that they have reached a deal with creator Dianne English and star Candice Bergen to revive Murphy Brown, a 10-year hit for the network that first debuted in 1988. It is just the latest in television’s zombie lineup of shows that been repeatedly stabbed, shot, blown up and generally worn out but simply will not die.
Bergen, who debuted on her father’s radio show at age 6, is now 71. The fictional baby that riled the 1992 Presidential campaign when then-Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the glamorization of single motherhood would be 26. Don’t struggle trying to remember the sex of the baby because, by now, nine chances out of 10 the kid is probably transitioning to something else.
According to the network the revival will be set in “a world of cable news, fake news and a very different political and cultural climate.” In other words, like the cast of Will & Grace, they are itching to get into the game of bashing one Donald J. Trump.
There are very few fictional characters that once they’ve left the culture I’ve pined to learn their fate. I really don’t care to know what cable network Murphy Brown is reduced to working at. After the disaster that was the series finale for Mad About You (also slated for revival), I don’t care to revisit the domestic life of Paul and Jamie Buchanan. I don’t care if the truth is still out there nor does the prospect of John Goodman pulling a Patrick Duffy in the mind of Roseanne Barr send a thrill up and down my spine. What’s next? Does anyone want to know if Sam Malone of Cheers fell off the wagon and is dealing with the devastating effects of an STD?
Rule One of show business used to be “Don’t stay on the stage too long.” Rule Two should be “Don’t force your way back.” The Golden Rule was “Always leave them wanting more.”
Published in Entertainment
Turns out that Jack really was gay all along. He came out to the gay guy who was fronting the money for the bistro. Now they’re married and owners of the apartment building. Jack thinks there might be a sex trafficking ring in the old apartment, but every time he thinks he has them exposed there is always some weird misunderstanding full of double entendre and prat falls, and the status quo is restored. Besides, he’s warming up to those scamps. He’s got a nonjudgmental heart of gold after all.
I don’t have a problem with reboots and revivals if they legitimately have a story to tell. The recent Twin Peaks revival was no cynical retread of the original series; if anything, it went out of its way to defy expectations and not give fans of the original show what they wanted. (Ultimately I was disappointed with the revival, but my point is simply that it wasn’t an attempt to recycle a lifeless franchise. It was utterly new, even if it failed.)
I’m going to stay far away from the Murphy Brown revival because it seems clear going in that the show will have an overt political agenda that would just annoy me. I might, however, watch a Mad About You revival, but only if the writing returns to the quality of that show’s early seasons. I think I’ll wait until the reviews are out.
My wife and I liked that show up until the Murphy Brown character had the kid. Then it started having political overtones, and then we had our own kid, so we had other things to do.
After all the controversy over the Dan Quayle comments about the difficulties of single motherhood, the show’s writers proved Quayle’s point. Once the baby was born, he slowly disappeared from the show. The Murphy Brown character never had to make any sacrifices in time or effort for the sake of her child. Single motherhood wasn’t even portrayed as easy for a rich woman, it was just ignored.
Then it started having political overtones? You might want to go back and watch those first couple seasons again.
Yup, when it was still a comedy. Nothing worse than a sitcom trying to establish dramatic heft. I’ll except Family Ties here because they isolated the more dramatic episodes. M*A*S*H did that pretty well, too; here’s some drama, next week we’ll get Radar drunk again.
The term ‘TV’ often is taken to refer to broadcast television, which is the only kind of television there was for a long time. That is the way the term is being used in the OP. If you watch a movie on your rectangular display from a DVD, is that watching TV? How about streaming a movie using Netflix? I think most people would say those are not watching TV; rather it is watching a movie.
By the way, I love it when people get offended by semantics and pretend to be “confused,” especially if they are “genuinely confused.” I totally get it.
Mad About You is an interesting test case. It was funny and wildly popular. It was on during the early stages of our marriage and it was very easy to relate to.
The whole thing went off the rails at the end. One episode was nothing but the baby crying. It sank so quickly the show was known inside NBC as “The Titanic.” The finale featured a grown kid who was completely screwed up and a marriage in tatters. It also screwed up their future in syndication. Who wants to emotionally invest in that?
In the end Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt (fresh off her Oscar win) were pulling down $1M per episode each. Neither are hot commodities today so it will be interesting to see if the project really gets to the runway let alone takes off.
I was looking forward to the X-Files reboot. But I just watched the episode from last night. It had an alien stepping out of his space ship and telling Mulder and Scully that they are building a wall so that no more earthlings can explore space. He even said “You’re not sending us your best people.”
I’m so sick to death of these writers. I can hear them patting themselves on the back from here. When I watch TV, I want to be entertained, not yelled at, not lectured to, and certainly not clubbed over the head with your juvenile political views. Can there not be one tiny corner of my life free from this swill?
They can’t remake the Dukes of Hazzard. What would the General Lee be without the Confederate flag on top?
When Mad About You was good, it had some great moments. I still quote, “We only made up the whole bing and the bang just to get the boom.”
I didn’t like it when they got serious and threw in marital difficulties. And they did the coming out thing where a character you already knew turns out to be gay. That seemed to be mandatory for a while there – it seemed every show suddenly had a gay character.
I’d be willing to give it a chance if the writing were as snappy as “bing, bang, boom” and they didn’t get political.
The General Sherman?
Make Luke and Duke black, and they can have whatever kind of car they want.
That qualifies as an 8th Amendment violation. I’m not a fan of the show’s humor, if it is that. It consisted of making people look like jack—es, then having other people make fun of them. It’s particularly grating when one person is in the middle and immune…like Ellen and certainly Murphy Brown. At least that was my perception of the few episodes I forced myself to watch.
When Mad About you was in it’s early seasons every single guy I knew (and some of the married ones) wanted to be married to Jamie.
The episode with the Senior Center Pirates of Penzance performance and Jamie’s Post-partum depression rant to the woman about to get married was probably the all-time highlight of the entire series. (“Let’s see, what rhymes with ‘complain about’? I know – Schmecky out!”). For my money that’s one of the classic TV episodes of all time, right up there with Chuckles the Clown’s funeral and WKRP’s Turkey drop.
Show went downhill rapidly after that. The series finale was a trainwreck. I blame Janeane Garofalo.
Same here. My wife and I were about the same age as Paul and Jamie, and at that point we were still content to be childless. The show was so good in part because it was so grounded in reality. It might not seem so groundbreaking now, but at the time it was quite innovative to show a couple at home with such realism, brushing their teeth or lounging around in pajamas. I also appreciated the attention to continuity; over time you learned a lot about their history and their families, and it all held together.
The show did seem to jump the shark about the time the baby arrived, but I think the main problem was that the writers lost their grip on reality. The stories became increasingly unrealistic and sitcom-silly. It became impossible to relate to, and we gave up. I’ve never even seen the finale, although I’ve read synopses of it.
Sherman had a tank. He doesn’t need a car.
A couple of black guys – hell, make it girls – riding around in the General Sherman and busting the corrupt Democratic mayor, sheriff and local KKK chapter while avoiding the (corrupt, Democratic) IRS (and ATF, BLM, FBI …) sounds cool, and definitely “ripped from the headlines”….
The Will and Grace revival works because their central topic has become a lot more mainstreamed since the show last went off the air, but also for a simpler reason: the actors look pretty much the same as they did 20 years ago. It’s easy to accept that the characters existed the whole time they were off the air.
These things can be paradoxical. Remember the reaction to Harrison Ford’s appearance in ST: The Force Awakens? “Wow, he looks great!” That was in 2015. Remember the reaction he got for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”? “Wow, he looks decrepit!” That was 2008.
I used to do a lot of anniversary events with classic films. The 25th was usually the sweet spot; with decent luck, good genes, and discreet surgery, it was the last time the cast looked more or less the way they did when they were 25 years old.
I can’t forget seeing Grace on one of those anti-Trump celebrity videos.
Nah. But if Ray Romano wanted to continue “Men of a Certain Age,” that would be okay with me. I enjoyed that show.
Sadly, actor Jay Thomas (who played Murphy’s conservative rival Jerry Gold on MB) passed away last year. To me, his were the best episodes in the series after the first season. Gold’s energy matched and sometime bested Murphy’s, and the character was written with respect for the conservative viewpoint. The show would be well advised to represent conservatives honorably in the revival, to the degree that politics is present. After all, many comedy writers will tell you that surprising the audience is an important key to success, and what a wonderful surprise it would be to see even-handed comedy on CBS.
Networks are (wisely) going back to the classic comedy brands of yesteryear because the multi-camera ensemble is a reliable character and story design. Today, many U.S. comedy series rely too much on unsubtle sexual references, or upon characters intended to reflect the presumed preoccupations of a target niche demographic. Back in the day, broadcasting had to appeal to a larger audience to survive, so all ages were welcome. And the comedy itself was constrained by broadcast standards, so writers needed more than lewd remarks in their tool kits.
Programs like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers, Taxi, Seinfeld, Frasier, and Everybody Loves Raymond don’t come around very often, but they trained enough writers to keep the genre evolving for forty years. I welcome all the revivals, if only because some of the older writers will have opportunities to pass their craft along to younger generations.
He didn’t ask: “what is TV”? He asked: [do] “people still watch TV”?
This is an apt question on a few modern levels.
My kids, who have never had any experience with scheduled television (we don’t have cable or watch local broadcast shows), call everything that appears on television a “movie.” So even if we’re just watching an episode of a television show that we have on DVD, it’s “a movie” to them. Just a really short one, I guess.
“Let’s watch a movie” could mean “let’s watch this 24-minute episode of a television show.”
I’ve often remarked about the “olden days” when, if you missed an episode of a television show, you hoped to catch it on rerun a few months later, because if you missed it then, you’d probably never get to see it EVER! (Unless it went into syndication.)
They still haven’t entirely grasped that.
Which is why there’s so much left-wing messaging. The Democrats are the “party of the rich” after all.
I liked the show too, but I’m not quite sure where else it can go. Men of a certain age simply are not that interesting. There’s not as much foot loose and fancy free available to them without the character being a loser or without the episodes becoming too soapy or ridiculous. Financially, emotionally, philosophically, spiritually stable people do not make great entertainment.
Just watched that episode last night. It was The X-Files’ jump-the-shark moment. Sad.
My apologies.
What exactly does a country with so much state-run television need with another “public service” station? Enough already. Leave the poor public alone.
I think reunions are great. Put out a special which is double the running time of the average original series episode then call it a life. Because you can never go home again.
I suggest a few axioms of TV programming:
1971 was a seminal year in television. At the end of the the 70-71 television season programmers at CBS convinced Bill Paley that he to “urbanize” the network’s lineup. Axed in one fell swoop were a lot of still popular but rural based programs: Hee Haw, Mayberry RFD, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, etc. (Petticoat Junction, crippled by the death of Bea Benaderet ended the previous season.) In January of that year they found a mid-season replacement hit called All in the Family. That would retool CBS for the decade and beyond.
The WWII generation would begin to enter their 50s. The boomers were the new target and the drift left began in earnest.
Today it’s a scramble for whatever piece of the pie they can get. Schedule flow means little because eyeballs are no longer gathered in a linear fashion. Overnight ratings are less important until they get combined with results from DVRs/VOD/Streaming services.
And where are the program decisions made? Places such as New York where there’s only 500,000 registered Republicans in a voter base of 5 million and Los Angeles where Democrats enjoy a 5-2 ratio in registrations.
I loved that show and really mourned its cancellation. I felt like those guys were friends of mine. So you’re the other person who was watching it!