Murphy Brown is Kick-Ass!

I have a confession to make: I can't stand the Mary Tyler Moore show. I realize that it is a important show in that it had the first single, independent career woman as it's star, but I never found the Mary Richards character to be a great role model. She was just too weak and dull.

Now, Murphy Brown is more than just a role model. She's a kick-ass role model. And she changed the face of American television. There are still some aspects of her character, mostly her razor-sharp wit, that hasn't been seen on television since.

Murphy Brown aired for 247 episodes from 1988 to 1998. It's first episode began with Murphy, a forty year old, single, award-winning and famous investigative journalist and a co-anchor on a live newsmagazine show called FYI. Murphy returns to work to find that the show's producer has been replaced by a young Yale grad called Miles Silverberg, who is a naive, over-achieving yuppie and knows almost nothing about producing a news show. The Network as also added a new member to FYI, the Pollyanna-like Corky Sherwood, a former Miss America, who is perpetually perky and knows nothing about world affairs. She does those light stories about puppies and decor they show at the end of the hard-hitting FYI episodes.

The pilot takes place on Murphy's first day back at work after she has been in rehab for alcohol and cigarettes.

This had never been done before. Normally it's the male characters on a show that have a drinking problem and have just turned forty and have no intention of getting married. But here, it was a woman and a famous woman at that, at the top of her profession and played by a famous actress (Candice Bergen).

Rounding out the cast of characters are Frank, the show's undercover reporter and Murphy's best friend, Jim Dial, the stoic veteran anchor, Phil the owner of the bar next to the studio in Washington D.C. who knew everything about every political figure for the past fifty years, especially stuff that the public didn't know and Eldin, the philosophical artist that Murphy hired to paint her house in the pilot and spent the next six years painting murals all over her house. He's my favourite character in the show.

But over the course of the series, Murphy Brown as a character is about more than just a recovering alcoholic. She is intelligent, works very hard at her job, takes her duty as a journalist very seriously, loves pulling pranks, slops around the house in pyjamas, becomes a single mother, stands up to the Network suits on several occasions, deals with breast cancer in the final season and loves Motown with a passion.

The reason why I think that Murphy Brown is a better role model than any other character on television today is that she stood behind her principals, even if it would cost her her job. Murphy Brown was made just before the news and the world of the journalist changed dramatically with the popularity of 24 hour news networks and everyone getting a summary of the news from the internet as it happens. For Murphy, being a journalist was about getting a story or an interview on the air, without compromising her ethics. Even if it meant landing in jail for not revealing her sources.

Murphy is also tough as nails. She got to the top of her profession on her own merits and isn't going to let anyone treat her as a little lady.

All this being said, Murphy Brown is also a hilarious sitcom that has really aged well. A lot of sitcoms get old and unfunny really fast, but not this one. Even it's topical political satire is still funny. It also deals with some issues that aren't present in today's shows and it also assumes that the audience is actually paying attention to what's going on.

Murphy Brown is still shown on reruns on a few channels, but it's largely forgotten today, and I really don't understand why. The first season was released on Region 1 DVD, but they wont release the remaining nine seasons on DVD because the the "high cost" of obtaining the music rights to songs, since the show had no theme song and played Motown songs throughout every episode. Which is a damned shame, since the show is cleverer than most modern shows on now, ridiculous 80's fashions aside. Actually, I quite like some of Murphy's clothes, since they suit her character.

The torrent for the first season is on most public sites, whereas the torrents for the remaining seasons are available on the private site TV Vault.

This is a clip from a show about why the 90's ruled.

This is the rather short piece about Murphy Brown from the PBS show America in Primetime.

I found it hard to get clips from the show, so here is a promo for it's Australian syndication

The longest and funniest running gag on the show was the crazy secretaries that Personal kept sending to Murphy's desk. Above is a clip of the secretary of the day from the first season and below are two clip shows of the secretaries that Murphy had to deal with in the first season.

Cinema Tuesdays {Tootsie}

1982's Tootsie tells the story of Dustin Hoffman playing a struggling actor named Michael Dorsey. He's actually an excellent actor and everyone, including his respected agent, admires his work. The problem is that he can't hold a job down because he's such a damned perfectionist and no one will hire him because he's just too difficult to work with. He's also almost 40 and hasn't had an acting job in four months.

His friend Teri Garr has an unsuccessful audition for a role on a soap opera called Southwest General and both out of desperation and in need of raising money to put on his room mate's new play, he decides to audition himself.

Using his skill of doing his own makeup, Michael becomes Dorothy Michaels, flunks the audition, tells the pompous director to fuck himself and is hired by the female producer.

The sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot director is played by wonderfully played by Dabney Coleman, who also played a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot executive in 9 to 5

What makes this film great, aside from being hilarious and the hijinks that ensue from Michael working in drag and trying to maintain a personal life is that you tend to forget that Dustin Hoffman is playing Dorothy. You forget that this is a man playing Dorothy, he's just that good at it.

My favourite character is this film is Bill Murray playing Michael's room mate. Bill Murray was a big star at this point, but he's wonderful in this small role and apparently he improvised his lines.

Dorothy Michaels objects to most of her lines and the way her character is written, so she makes up her own lines and turns the character into a tough, well-rounded woman, which you don't normally see on soap operas. As a result she becomes America's hottest new actress.

On the other hand, Michael falls for Dorothy's co-star and new best friend Julie, a single mother in an unhealthy relationship with the director. And Julie's widowed father falls for Dorothy.

Hilarity ensues.

"That is one nutty hospital"

Cinema Tuesdays {Victor Victoria}

For those of you who have not seen it, Victor Victoria is Blake Edwards' 1982 remake of a little known 1933 German film of the same name wherein a struggling light opera singer named Victoria (Julie Andrews) meets up with Toddy (Robert Preston) a struggling gay cabaret singer who comes up with a brilliant money making idea. Turn Victoria into Victor, the world's greatest female impersonator and "he" becomes the toast of Paris, provided no one finds out that "he's" a phoney. Matters are of course complicated when James Garner shows up, falls in love with Victoria and doesn't approve of her "woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman" lifestyle.

I love this movie! It's hilarious, the suits are gorgeous and the interiors are stylish. Plus, I love the character of Norma, pretending to be Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight.