Culture Vultures

...But no Equity moppet played him, he wasn't seen in five years, and, most eerily of all, no mention was made of all the little things other mothers might talk about at the office —first teeth, steps, words...

...Then again, as the NBC Vice President for Broadcast Standards was at pains to point out, it was no longer true: the adviser in question, though still living in New Jersey, was now a psychotherapist...

...she'd have aborted —as Maude did in the seventies, in a reproductive choice now denied to TV characters groaning under the oppression of twelve years of Reagan-Bush-Quaylism...

...If he's still on the payroll, he must have his work cut out...

...But the serious bits are not what sitcoms do best...

...That's the easy bit...

...in Gore's world, it's appropriate to use sitcomsas an instrument of indoctrination...

...such Hollywood staples as the moment when, say, Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons pats his boy on the back and imparts the lesson of the week: "Remember, son, a man is never so tall as when he stoops to pick up another man's hat...

...Apparently, at NBC every script that referred in any way to homosexuality was sent for approval to a gay dentist in New Jersey...

...In the episode I'm referring to, the "real" politician had attacked the "fictional" character, whose "fictional" show then used "real" news footage of the " real"" attack as a pretext for a "fictional" attack on the "real" politician by the "fictional" character surrounded by dozens of "real" people...

...Although the public's feelings towards gays haven't significantly altered since the unenlightened jests twenty years ago on Three's Company, it's clear the TV establishment's has...

...At a stroke, the Vice President guaranteed that mom's middle-ranking sitcom would be festooned with awards, at whose ceremonies the producers, writers, and stars would earnestly declare the right of single women to make their own "lifestyle choices...

...At The American Spectator • January 1998 39...

...Candice Bergen...

...True comedy hasn't time for any of that: good jokes are hard to find, and to deny yourself one because the butt of it is the person you're supposed to be being solemn about this week is a form of self-denial most gag-writers have been reluctant to embrace...

...And now he's back...

...As a sitcom about a news show, its format enables it to "deal" with any number of issues," from the tobacco industry to foreign policy...

...The writers had come up with some pretty good cancer jokes for Murphy, but their impact TV's top single mom fails the ultimate ratings test...

...But there are, of course, different levels of "non-existence...

...Sitcoms that embrace issues tend to do so as a strategy of last resort: in the seventies, Maude had an abortion because otherwise the show wouldn't have made it through the third trimester...

...all they wanted was to get Murphy back to the life she'd had before she got pregnant...

...Had Murphy spent her last five years telling bedtime stories to Avery or taking him to museums or teaching him Latin, that wouldn't have done anything for the cause of single motherhood...

...But little Ricky stuck around, so did Samantha's Tabitha on Bewitched, and whatever the name of that kid on Rhoda was...

...The vast mass of American people who aren't on TV know that the ones who are are special, different...

...Look at all those acclaimed Norman Lear sitcoms of the seventies, taking their drearily correct line on every social issue going—all of them rotting in some basement storage room now, while Lucy and Dick Van Dyke and Bewitched sail on in reruns...

...Murphy Brown is a sitcom character beloved of the liberal media, a TV anchorwoman played by MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic ofthe Spectator of London...

...Except, that is, for the episode when Murphy tried the benefits of medicinal marijuana: the cancer groups pulled out, but the regular advertisers returned...

...In other words, the show's never been that interested in its principals as people with lives—with families, with webs of relationships—but only as projections of attitudes...

...Ed Weinberger, a giant of the small screen who's given us The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, and Taxi among others, was impressed...

...Most sitcom regulars have a support staff of what they call "recurring" characters, who pop up every two or three episodes — Rhoda's mom and Murray's wife and Gordy the weatherman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show...

...Murphy turned to breast cancer because it has itself, for the last few seasons, been suffering from a comedic wasting disease—its premise exhausted, its characters riddled with gaping holes...

...That's not a conservative or liberal position, but one that answers to the deepest impulses of women in a society arranged to make the fulfillment of such impulses otherwise unlikely...

...or "Mary takes us behind the scenes at his new rug fitting...

...T hat's Murphy Brown's real problem...

...If you don't have a TV and live in what's left of the "real" world, you're probably a bit confused by now...

...It's doubtful whether he'd have okayed that joke...

...They could have left it at that...

...No matter how much you "force" down the American public's throat, it's still capable of distinguishing between TV and life: the white folks who tuned in every week to the black middle-class Huxtable family on Cosby were the same people who thought it prudent to cross the street if a young black man was strolling towards them on the sidewalk...

...Many single women feel the same way, but it doesn't usually work out like that — feeding, diaper-changing and so forth tend to intervene...

...Alas for them, the show didn't even make the Top 5o...

...Doubtless to the regret of him and his agent, this second issue doesn't seem to be lighting up the ratings of Murphy Brown...

...Still, even when Murphy Brown simply dropped Avery, the show's boosters were obliged to revise their story...

...You mean," he said in wonder, "there really is a Tooth Fairy...

...If Ellen's a hit, that doesn't tell us anything about public attitudes toward gay marriage—any more than the Broadway success of La Cage Aux Folles does...

...As Al Gore, yet another vice-presidential sitcom analyst, has observed droningly: "When the character Ellen came out, millions of Americans were forced to look at sexual orientation in a more open light...

...he was no longer a dentist...

...Vice President Quayle is also a great comic figure in the liberal media...

...The operative word is "forced...

...Some years ago, at a conference in California, the subject of censorship came up...

...Even in vitro, he was the most famous child in America —the feminist poster boy of the 1992 presidential election...

...That may be regrettable, but it suggests limitations to situation comedy's potential for social progress...

...for Ellen, it was a choice between coming out or going off...

...It soon became clear that, aside from their gesture of solidarity with single moms the world over, the producers hadn't a clue what to do with Avery: they'd spent so long basking in the approval of Planned Parenthood, they hadn't had time to put together a planned childhood...

...And maybe even funny, too...

...But Avery just ceased to exist, even the once-or-twice-a-season references to him disappeared, until you began to wonder whether some great off-stage tragedy had occurred, some unpleasantness with a British nanny maybe, or perhaps adoption by Vice President Quayle...

...Avery should be five years old now, but instead he's about seven — presumably the premature aging being a symptom of the trauma he's suffered at not having seen his birth mother since the '92 election...

...After all, as some commentators pointed out, there's something faintly ridiculous about a controversy over a character who doesn't really exist (the Vice President...

...It's not just Avery who's kept in the wings, but also Doris, wife of the buttoned-down, anal retentive anchor Jim Dial, and even Corky's husband Miles, who left the show but was kept alive on the end of a telephone for a season and a half...

...Murphy Brown's creators couldn't be bothered with any of that fortheir stellar career gal so, with the heartlessness of any crack mother tossing her unwanted kid in the dumpster, they simply got rid of the baby...

...Oh, sure, officially he was still there, back in the nursery...

...Indeed, most non-Americans regard them as an insult to comedic integrity, disdaining44 As soon as he was born, Murphy made another 'lifestyle choice' and he hasn't been seen since...

...I know off hand at least a dozen single women who, with their biological clocks running down, happened to find themselves pregnant by some passing fancy and decided to keep the child...

...I'm not so sure...

...Nonetheless, sensitive to the suggestion that hers was an option available only to successful career women, Murphy solemnly introduced a studio full of real-life single women from the decaying inner cities, persons of color, persons of gender, persons of both, all of whom took issue with Quayle's bizarre preoccupation with the outmoded two-parent family concept...

...most of the so-called "real" news shows are busy with "After Ellen, who'll be next to come out...

...As soon as he was born, Murphy made another "lifestyle choice": she stuck him at the back of the closet under the Emmy Awards and the commendations from single-parent outreach groups and mouldering editorials hailing the show for its courage, and the poor kid hasn't been seen since...

...Murphy Brown has found another issue—breast cancer—and suddenly the kid's needed again, to look upset when mommy tells him she's ill, or worse: Now that Ellen's the first show to bring its lead character out of the closet, Murphy might yet become the first to put its lead character into the casket...

...But I doubt whether he's really necessary...

...In the five years since little Avery's birth ushered in the Clinton era, Murphy Brown has been on CBS every week, Dan Quayle has been back in Indiana (and Arizona...

...She didn't have to do that...

...But ever since Diane English created the show, the hinterlands of Murphy Brown's company seem to have been artificially closed off...

...As an approach to comedy, it's likely to prove disastrous, reducing most shows to the pitiful state of Gore's quadrennially stricken relatives...

...Whether or not, as the famous Atlantic Monthly cover had it, "Dan Quayle Was Right" about single mothers in general, he was certainly right about Murphy Brown in particular...

...Ah, yes, they said, someone like Murphy would never have had that baby...

...38 January 1998 • The American Spectator was diluted by Candice Bergen's decision to appear, at her most po-faced, in the commercials for breast cancer support groups and helplines, whose sponsorship now seems to predominate...

...That kind of motherhood for Murphy would have been understandable and true...

...As delighted feminist commentators had pointed out, he was the most talked-about TV baby since Lucy's little Ricky...

...But, in a subsequent episode, Murphy went on air to respond directly to Quayle's criticisms...

...But Avery...

...You can more or less guess what its line will be, but at least it raises the topics...

...Exceptions, not rules...

...Though the producers showed no contrition, the lesson of Avery Brown's non-life would seem to be that even a wholly fictional single mom finds it hard to cope...

...But, as an approach to public policy, it's even more doubtful...

...some of these "recurring roles" even blossom into fully-fledged regulars—like Frasier and Lilith on Cheers...

...His mom, Murphy Brown, had been attacked by Dan Quayle for having a baby out of wedlock...