From 1988 to 1998, CBS sitcom Murphy Brown presciently skewered the news industry and modern politics through the eyes of the title character, an investigative reporter played by Candice Bergen who finds herself working for a CBS newsmagazine show. Over its ten-year run, the show had quite a bit to say about the interplay of journalism and politics, even getting dragged into the political morass itself thanks to then-Vice President Dan Quayle. And, as it approaches the 30th anniversary of its debut, it appears Brown isn’t quite done yet.
CBS has announced that next year, it will air an eleventh season of the show, starring Bergen and written and executive-produced by Diane English, the show’s original creator and writer. Brown will still be working at network news, and once again dealing with actual news stories. Quayle, for example, got the full force of the show’s wrath in an episode that made fun of Quayle’s multiple highly visible PR gaffes and that cut his actual speech complaining about a fictional character getting pregnant and having a child into the episode to make fun of him.
As for the return itself, well, certainly there’s no lack of material in modern politics, but then, there never is. The main question is whether a show that went off the air well before Mark Zuckerberg went to Harvard can pick up where it left off. But we’ll find out when the season debuts sometime in the 2018-2019 TV season on CBS.
(via CBS)
