When Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) walks back into Phil’s Bar (now run by Tyne Daly as Phil’s sister, Phyllis), the studio audience applauds. Why wouldn’t they? The original “Murphy Brown” was a cultural milestone, and Ms. Bergen’s acid performance as a brilliant, abrasive TV journalist was a classic of the form. In another episode, Murphy’s old colleague Jim Dial (Charles Kimbrough) tells her not to give in to pressure to interview the white nationalist blowhard Ed Shannon (David Costabile, wearing multiple shirts lest you miss the Steve Bannon rhyme). “You don’t have to give equal time to someone who claims Tom Hanks is running a shadow government,” Jim says. Again, the audience applauds. Later, Murphy runs into Shannon at the bar, and immolates him in an argument, telling him that he’s going to end up “a sad, sad, sad, sad dinosaur who went extinct.” The audience applauds, and applauds again. You see the pattern. The revival, beginning Thursday on CBS, is feisty and eager to meet the Trumpian moment. But it’s become the kind of sitcom that prefers applause to laughs. (Or at least it goes for “clapter,” the kind of laughs audiences award like merit badges for validating their beliefs.)<doc-sep>Why "Murphy Brown"? Why now? With our current parade of TV reboots, remakes and revivals, those are questions worth asking, as familiar faces continue to grace our screens. Many popular shows could have been revived or rebooted, so what justifies bringing back Murphy (Candice Bergen), Corky (Faith Ford), Frank (Joe Regalbuto) and Miles (Grant Shaud) in 2018? The real answer is the election and interest among the cast and crew, but at the very least a series dedicated to the responsible practice of journalism makes a compelling case. And it seems the cast and creator Diane English are energized, diving into the 2018 political and social arena with verve. But theend result is mixed. "Murphy" (Thursday, 9:30 EDT/PDT, ★★½ out of four), in which the star reporter steps into a cable-news morning show, is a hodgepodge of political preaching and nostalgic pandering, with a few moments of genuine comedy and emotion. It is not "Murphy" at its height but "Murphy" enough to be enjoyable, once it works out a few kinks. More:How 'Murphy Brown' revival finds new targets in the Trump era The 11th season premiere establishes Murphy as a woman frustrated with her inability to have an impact on a world she perceives to be crumbling around her. On "Murphy in the Morning," she's determined to fight for truth and stand apart from the talking heads on TV. In addition to learning how to report in a world of tweets and nonstop cable news, she also discovers that her son Avery (Jake McDorman, "Limitless"), all grown up and an accomplished TV journalist, has just been offered his own show in the same time slot at a rival cable outlet, the Wolf Network. Subtlety is rare in the new version of the series, which doles out on-the-nose and groan-worthy punchlines like candy and features just as many name-dropping references as it did in the '90s (the "Roseanne" cancellation to Bernie Madoff are referenced in the premiere). "Murphy" also tries to modernize with the addition of Pat (Nik Dodani) a millennial social-media director on "Murphy in the Morning," less a character than a collection of millennial stereotypes, whose dialogue is mostly an assortment of lame jokes about the oldsters. More:'Murphy Brown' revival will tackle cable news, #MeToo and attacks on the press Modernizing proves difficult for the series, which is often downright preachy about politics. While the show was a progressive touchstone that mixed real-world politics with fiction (just ask Dan Quayle), there's something naive about its approach to 2018 politics. Murphy often appears to be a one-woman bastion against a storm of fake news, standing up to Sarah Sanders in a White House briefing and refusing to interview a thinly veiled stand-in for former presidential aide Steve Bannon. And while it's clear the loud and raucous in-studio audience is ready to clap and cheer for every bit of Murphy resistance, it occasionally gets tiresome and stilted. Murphy might hate talking heads, but she has a lot in common with them. Murphy's grandstanding is tempered by Avery, who often puts his mother in her place. Avery is often the most interesting aspect of the series, and McDorman is a fabulous addition to the cast. His natural chemistry with Bergen makes them instantly believable as mother and son. Murphy also feels in line with where we'd expect to find her. She's in a state of dissociated anger and shock from Donald Trump's election, and she's dedicating herself to solutions, however messy her tactics. Because Murphy is in a preachy, sanctimonious state of mind, the show can seem smug. But when the episodes slow down and focus on Murphy's relationship with her son, or her internal struggle with the new world of journalism, there's a spark of the old magic. More:Candice Bergen has changed her mind about her pal, ousted CBS chief Leslie Moonves Of the recent high-profile revivals, "Will & Grace" got better as the cast and writers settled into a rhythm. "Roseanne," before it imploded offscreen, was a little too political onscreen. Here's hoping Murphy and friends sail through 2018 without sinking under the weight of its inanity.<doc-sep>For a show that’s centered around a world-renowned and hugely accomplished journalist, “Murphy Brown” knows less than it ever did about how the media works. That’s the first mark against the rebooted “Murphy,” which returns to the air 20 years after its initial 10-season run concluded. Then, Brown (five-time Emmy winner Candice Bergen) was host of the TV newsmagazine “FYI.” When we meet up with her again, disillusioned by having retired at the very moment many Americans seemed to more deeply engage with the daily news cycle, she’s decided to start her own morning show, produced by and costarring all of the colleagues from her “FYI” days. And get this — her twenty-something son just got his own morning show on a competing network! And they’re living together! It’s not necessarily that none of this would likely happen that nags at the viewer — after all, the reality of “Murphy” 1.0 was fairly elastic. It’s that the show urgently wants to make comment on the times in which we live, but plays it fast and loose with every particular on which it’s uniquely positioned to actually make a statement. Murphy’s son Avery Brown (Jake McDornan) has been given two daily hours of airtime at what we’re told is America’s pre-eminent conservative cable news network. And yet not merely is the show filling the space that’s occupied in our world by “Fox & Friends” with a sunny-to-the-point-of-pointlessness series in which Avery encourages frank debate between small-town Americans, but it’s not even depicted as Fox News. The show that once took specific news anchors — even ones from CBS! — to task now defaults to a portrait of “the Wolf network” so generic as to have no bite at all. Murphy, meanwhile, uses her easily won platform as a morning-show anchor to deliver absolutely nothing that will surprise anyone. “Murphy Brown” is obsessed, for instance, with theorizing around Russia, with jokes about President Donald Trump’s friendship with Vladimir Putin and about Russian hitmen who might take Murphy out. And it devotes its second episode to an unflattering portrait of Sarah Huckabee Sanders and its third to a yet-more-unflattering and fictionalized Steve Bannon. The treatment of Sanders, who’s depicted through existing footage and the use of a voice actor as harboring a crush on Avery and as an obsessive object of fascination for producer Miles (Grant Shaud), is worse than shabby. Bafflingly, Miles fantasizes about Sanders in the shower, then announces “I have a thing for domineering women.” This is treatment that deserves the sort of opprobrium Michelle Wolf unfairly got after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner; it’s a slackening of morals and standards simply because “Murphy’s” writers dislike Sanders so much. And even those predisposed to disdain Bannon may feel less invigorated than bored by Murphy refusing to interview “him” on-air. Shen then dismantles him in a private one-on-one conversation; a debate between two fictional characters, one at her best and the other at his worst, is many things, but it’s not a meaningful policy conversation. We’re told that Murphy’s takedown of the Bannon-esque character, taped surreptitiously, ended up going viral, with Murphy being able to deliver the death blow no journalist has been able to in our real world and without having given her adversary undue airtime while doing so. It’s another instance of the show’s trend towards wish fulfillment. The comparisons to this year’s vexed and now-retooling “Roseanne” revival are clear on their face: Both shows center around a heroine whose willingness to state her beliefs plainly will make those viewers at home who agree with her cheer. But Roseanne Conner and Murphy Brown, in their 2018 iterations, differ, too: Roseanne’s politics were entirely and unabashedly personal, focused as they were on an incoherent defense of Trump. She just liked him, and had reverse-engineered a worldview that allowed her to ignore the ways in which his policies were incompatible with her family bonds. Murphy, in this telling, is an equally familiar type, someone whose personal distaste for the President has allowed him to take up an increasing portion of her psychic real estate and intensify her rhetorical style, making her a righteous crusader but increasingly poor company. Bergen, who was so good this summer in the movie “Book Club,” seems ill at ease here, delivering dialogue that seems better-suited for the page than the rat-a-tat pace of the newsroom. “Murphy Brown” 1.0 was a sitcom about what it took to make a good news show — the compromises that go along with that, not all of them journalistic. The supporting characters, once quirky and helpful pals to Murphy, now seem drained: They only pipe up when they have something to say about Trump. Character, meaningful conflict, and any concept of what the news might actually look like were it not single-mindedly devoted to coverage of the President and company goes out the window. In their place are Thanksgiving-table-from-hell arguments, ones during which anyone watching already will be on Murphy’s side. (If any conservative fans remain, they’ll have tuned out by the midpoint of the Sanders episode — a calculated risk on the part of series creator/showrunner Diane English, perhaps, and a strange one.) “There’s such insanity out there,” Murphy says early in the series, as she prepares to return to TV news, “that I was becoming this nut job yelling at the TV. I’d rather be in the TV yelling out.” It’s the show’s only real acknowledgment, in its first three episodes, that some balance has been lost, that, as much as Roseanne Conner, she’s sacrificed everything she once was that wasn’t directly tied into her political crusade. On “Murphy Brown,” she’s applauded for it; her popularity and Twitter followers spike, and everyone in the White House Briefing Room gasps in a sort of horrified delight when she asks Sanders, “Why do you lie?” (Notably, a celebrity cameo in the first episode was redacted from the screener sent to critics; one assumes it’ll feature an unnamed A-lister lavishing more praise upon Murphy’s mission.) She’s not really doing the investigative journalism she once did anymore.<doc-sep>Actually, that’s not entirely true. Two other network reboots in the past year came on almost as strong and topically on-the-nose: NBC’s “Will & Grace” arose from the dead to express its dismay at the state of the world since President Trump’s 2016 election, and, like “Murphy Brown,” endeavored to personalize the events of the past year or two for gay man Will and his BFF Grace, who seethe together in snarky disgust from their seemingly elitist perch in Manhattan. Thriving off its resistance energy, “Will & Grace” almost seamlessly rediscovered its essential humor, building up from its politics rather than getting mired in them.<doc-sep>
Groan, if you must, at the pink “Original Nasty Woman” sweatshirt Murphy Brown is wearing in her first prime-time appearance since the Clinton administration, but you can’t deny that she deserves the title. Candice Bergen’s righteous, irascible TV journalist was making powerful men—namely, Vice President Dan Quayle—nervous even before Bill and Hillary moved into the White House. It already felt safe to assume that Murphy would have backed Mrs. Clinton in 2016, and that she would scream with all the anguish of a Munch painting when her candidate lost to Donald Trump. That CBS’s revived Murphy Brown, which premieres on Sept. 27, opens with this election-night wail, preceded by a montage of Clinton and Trump clips from the campaign trail, speaks volumes about its intended audience. It seems impossible that anyone watching this particular show could possibly need a reminder of what it was like to live through those months. But before she flashes forward to the 2018 Women’s March (in lieu of a pussy hat, Murphy wears a Roman centurion’s helmet topped with hot-pink feathers), creator Diane English, who wrote the episode, seems determined to activate liberal viewers’ anger. Asked about how she expects Trump voters to receive the show, English has said, “They’re not going to watch us” and “I don’t think we’re looking to bring them into the tent.” In 2018, Murphy Brown is primal scream therapy for the Resistance. Admittedly, English’s heroine—a feminist icon with a sixth sense for spotting corruption, lying and egotism—makes a pretty ideal mouthpiece for Trump-era outrage. Murphy Brown’s return to TV and Murphy Brown’s return to the anchor’s desk seem equally inevitable, and the setup for both comebacks is no more elaborate than it needs to be: Bored after her retirement from the broadcast newsmagazine FYI and itching to blurt truth to power, Murphy conceives a cable morning show over beers at Phil’s (now run by Phil’s sister Phyllis, played by the great Tyne Daly) with her old colleagues. While slick investigative reporter Frank Fontana (Joe Regalbuto) is languishing in academia, perky Corky Sherwood (Faith Ford) has just been replaced on a Today-like program by a younger, sexier weather girl. (FYI’s resident old-school newsman, Charles Kimbrough’s Jim Dial, has taken refuge from the 24/7 news cycle on the high seas but comes ashore for brief arc beginning in Episode 3.) Even their fragile, anxiety-ridden former producer, Miles Silverberg (Grant Shaud), reluctantly signs on. The new show, Murphy in the Morning, comes complete with a walking millennial stereotype: Pat Patel (Atypical’s Nik Dodani, making the best of a broad character), a sweet yet officious social media whiz. It’s hard to tell whether Pat was added in hopes of attracting an audience too young to have watched Murphy the first time around or as comedy relief for a core viewership that might enjoy a laugh at the expense of “kids today,” but he isn’t the only 20-something upstart here. Murphy’s son Avery (Jake McDorman of Greek and Limitless) has grown up to be a TV journalist, and he’s developing a rival morning show as the “token liberal” on the conservative Wolf Network. This is a coincidence that only a network sitcom with a laugh track would float, and even if you can suspend your disbelief, Avery is so underwritten that his Pod Save America T-shirt says more about him than his storylines. Like the late Robert Pastorelli’s hip house painter Eldin Bernecky, from the original series, he exists mostly to give Murphy someone to talk to at home. But Eldin was a fully formed character whose slacker machismo made him a perfect foil for her. Couldn’t Avery at least have been a Bernie Bro? Murphy is stronger when it sticks to the workplace, both because the veteran cast members are still so sharp and because Murphy in the Morning forces the show to trade generic political outrage for more specific stories about the many challenges facing a news media that the president has tarred as “the enemy of the American people.” (The show itself openly baits the White House, too, with faux Trump tweets about Murphy and broadsides against Sarah Huckabee Sanders that make Michelle Wolf’s burns sound like compliments.) While jokes about Trump being “Facebook friends with Putin” feel borrowed from two-year-old protest signs, an episode centered around a rather thinly veiled Steve Bannon character is an especially potent mix of topical humor and object lesson in media literacy.