It has been a chaotic couple of weeks at CBS (to put it mildly), but the network isn’t letting recent controversies deter its original programming from tackling difficult issues in its plot lines.
For instance, the fourth episode of the upcoming reboot of one of its most popular, and boldest series in network history, Murphy Brown, will be titled “#MurphyToo,” Adweek TV/media editor Jason Lynch reports.
The series creator Diane English addressed the decision during a panel at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour in Los Angeles.
“On behalf of everybody on our show, we take the allegations of sexual misconduct extremely seriously,” English said of the Les Moonves allegations. “So seriously that we actually developed an episode about the #MeToo movement many months ago. … We support the investigation fully.”
So how about the series itself? There will be much of the same, and some significant differences.
The same? Expect more cameos from famous journalists, something that was a hallmark of the program during its 10-year run in the late 1980s and 1990s.
“We’ve always tried to blur the lines between fiction and reality, and we were so successful in doing that in the first iteration of this show that the vice president thought Murphy was a real person, and so we plan to do the same thing again,” English explained. “We’ve approached a number of people. And we haven’t closed any deals yet, but we do have an enormously famous person in our first episode that’s top secret. So I can’t tell you anything more than that.”
So what’s different? The characters will be engulfed in the world of 24-hour cable news.
Candice Bergen returns as Murphy Brown, and her baby boy from the first iteration is all grown up now. Her son, Avery, now played by Jake McDorman, is also a TV newser who is working for an opposing network called the Wolf Network, (which seems to be based on Fox News).
And Murphy, Corky, and Frank are starting a cable news morning show, the three of them, with Miles producing it, and that’s how the first show starts.
But there are some differences in the second iteration versus the original, as one may have guessed.
“When we left these characters in 1998, there was no internet. There was no social media. Cable news was just getting started,” said English. “So to take these characters and put them in the world of 24-hour cable news, which is what their new show is, it was very rich for us, very, very rich.”
There’s drama from the outset. The reboot’s opening montage begins on Nov. 8, 2016, and then proceeds to the present time.
“I’d just like to add something, too, and, Jake, maybe you can talk about this, that he does work for the Wolf Network, but he is the liberal voice on the Wolf Network,” Bergen explained.
Mother and son appearing on competing cable news networks makes for fun drama, especially considering Brown’s uber-competitive streak, something that won’t change in the reboot.
“Avery has had Murphy, obviously, as his mother, and he’s also had this kind of surrogate family with Corky and Frank and Miles teaching him everything he knows about journalistic integrity and also learning what it’s like to be the son of someone who is a celebrity,” McDorman said of his character. “And he’s finally at the age where, yeah, he’s got an opportunity to put all those lessons into practice, albeit on this kind of competing, more conservative network, but putting them into practice when they’re kind of under attack, and to have all the lessons accumulated that he’s learned via his mother and these people, to have to kind of put them to the test in a time where journalism is under siege is really, really interesting.”