In the United States, the press is still coherent despite multiple attacks. Murphy is in a new season that surrounds everything about the White House and what is really happening on the air, trying to follow up the events on its 'Murphy in the Morning' program, which the FWI team and the reporter Corky Sherwood.
There's a whiff of The Newsroom about the rebooted Murphy Brown, not so much in the show's sitcom bones-which are very, very creaky-but in the disconnect between all its highfalutin thinking about what the media can and should do.
In short, Murphy Brown was a lovably fractured mess and nobody's poster child for anything. Turning her into a geriatric Rachel Maddow-style Stalinist (Bergen is 72, around the same age as her character) does lethal damage to the heart of the show.
The early episodes don't suggest this humility. They don't seem to have learned that the world has not changed in the ways that Murphy most dislikes only because of the absence of journalists like her, but also because of the limitations.
If we haven't entirely lost our sense of humor in these polarized times, there's great nostalgic pleasure to be had watching Bergen's Murphy back in action, with foes worthy of her ideological wrath.
The new Murphy Brown feels detached from any reality other than an all-caps email forward about how Trump is [bad/disgusting/unacceptable/take your pick].
Easily the best aspect of Murphy Brown is how it acknowledges the meta elements of its existence without sacrificing the quality of its comedy or breaking the fourth wall.
