Media
McConnell, Frank
FRANK & CELESTE & DAN THE UNTHINKABLE 'MURPHY BROWN' I told them I'd do a piece about 'Murphy Brown' and the Dan Quayle silliness," I said to my wife as I hung up the phone. "Oh, good!" Celeste...
...Marrying Mike Brady with his three sons and relaxing into the anonymity of Hausfrau...
...The coverage in the Guardian, predictably, had treated the flap as yet another amusing indication that the ex-colonials were still not quite ready for full enfranchisement and, I have to tell you, from the viewpoint of British politics it's hard to fight that...
...Sure," I told Celeste...
...Lucy, on her own, has done something—screwed up—and she's terrified that Ricky will find out...
...Mm...
...So you see why Murphy Brown's choice is so threatening...
...My Little Margie.' 'Bachelor Father.' 'The Courtship of Eddie's Father.' 'A Family Affair.' 'My Three Sons.' And what do they all have in common...
...Look how mad people got at Hillary Clinton for being a sassy, efficient lawyer and a loyal wife and mother...
...For instance," she said...
...Celeste said...
...And where—V.P...
...And why...
...Like you always say, the choice is everything...
...Heads you go off to work, tails I bake cookies...
...Take 'The Brady Bunch...
...We'd been in London mourning my fiftieth birthday in May when Murphy gave birth to her single-parent kid and the Man-A-Heartbeat-From-The-Presidency declared that it was things like that that were causing our moral deterioration and riots in Los Angeles...
...You know better than that," she said, looking disappointed...
...How many times did you hear 'Oh, Donald!' or 'Oh, Mister Grant!' on those shows...
...But I'm getting ahead of myself...
...In each of those the woman's important only because she's given birth, not because she has anything to do with the real raising of the kids, which any fool knows is the opposite of the real world...
...And the housework in those series is taken care of by a butler or an older guy like Sebastian Cabot in 'Family Affair'— or by a woman who's not sexually significant for 'Dad,' like the Oriental widow in 'Eddie's Father.' 'Murphy Brown' scares the hell out of Danny boy and his pals because it says that women give birth and men can't, and that women have a right to be proud of that genetic advantage—or should I say, that genetic superiority...
...So the American sitcom, you're telling me, is about the fact that women are unreliable and unnecessary except as...unh...
...She has her kid, who cares if the father's not there, and it's all okay...
...What's the Great Sacred Cow of all sitcoms...
...Why don't you have some more coffee and write your piece...
...And the comedy justifies that: the woman on her own will screw up, unless the man retains firm control...
...One of them pays for being Murphy and the other one pays for not being Murphy...
...Like 'That Girl' and 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' ? Come on...
...Mario Thomas in 'That Girl' could have her fling in New York as a model, but only on the assumption that sooner or later she'd marry her boyfriend Donald...
...Try 'breeders,'" she said...
...Okay...
...And Mary could be a career woman as long as she stayed in that apartment—a girls' dorm, really— and remained in awe of Lou Grant...
...The daughters...
...And what is the source of the joke in episode after episode...
...You'll notice that Quayle and his people are all so passionately prolife, but that when Murphy decides to have her baby and not have an abortion, they think that's terrible too...
...You make it sound revolutionary," I said, lighting my third cigarette...
...What about 'The Brady Bunch' and 'Eight Is Enough' and 'The Dick Van Dyke Show?''' she said...
...And I've got some ideas about that whole thing, too—I mean, if you think you'd like to use any of them...
...Who cleans a privy in God's name...
...Check...
...Nope...
...Well, anyway, honey," she smiled, "that's just what I think...
...Yes...
...FRANK McCONNELL 20/17My 1992 Commonweal...
...And the people who are scared by that are the people I think you and I should be scared of...
...Because the mother's not really important after she gives birth...
...And Hausfrau is, already, a bad thing...
...Well, sure," I said...
...She's not afraid: she's not afraid to be herself and to give life and to function in the real world, and for her, being that kind of woman is not just within inches of tipping over into a horror film...
...And that's what scares the Quayles: it goes way deeper than abortion or single-parenting...
...Even Bush—who ought to be smarter in an election year—couldn't dissociate himself from Quayle's contradiction...
...It's never too far from the surface: because he might beat the hell out of her...
...Well, yeah," I said...
...Dignifies himself and the act thereby,'" I finished...
...Any ideas you have I'd...
...They were both great shows, but what was the message...
...It's a bad thing—anything is a bad thing—if you do it because you're brainwashed into thinking you have to do it: housewife, priest, general...
...But what fulfills her life...
...The flip side of your horror film idea," I said...
...Los Angeles burns and what do Dan and George Herbert Walker Bush sweat their shirts about...
...Dan gets the honor for this breakthrough—finally the politicians become such psychic prisoners of their media representation that they can't, even, any more seem to be able to tell the difference between life and life on the Tube...
...We both hate "I Love Lucy...
...But then you've got, before Murphy Brown, other really independent women on TV, like...
...You don't get it...
...I asked, lighting my first cigarette of the day and thinking, Gotcha...
...Celeste has this idea—which is right—that horror films like Poltergeist, The Shining, or the Nightmare on Elm Street series, involve families where the father is either absent or ineffectual, thus leaving the household open to the influence of an "uncontrolled" mother and therefore to the eruption of the irrational...
...I had another cup of coffee...
...No," she said...
...Everybody's been saying that...
...Murphy is the first woman in a sitcom to function fully professionally and sexually, and not to be made to pay a price for it...
...Well, yeah," I said, "but what about...
...Kids being raised by a male figure with the mother either dead or absent...
...I think you should...
...Not since Alice Cramden in 'The Honeymooners'—God bless Jackie Gleason—has there been a woman in a sitcom who can exist apart from 'her man'—that's to say, who can live with 'her man' as an equal person...
...The mother in the show is 'bringing up three lovely daughters,' right...
...What are the most successful sitcoms since the fifties...
...And "Unh—yeah," I said...
...I don't," she said...
...It's okay...
...I'm going to work in the garden...
...And look how Marilyn Quayle, another sassy, efficient lawyer, has put her career on hold to stand by her man...
...It was only when we got back that we realized how big a thing Vaffaire Brown was in this kinder gentler nation, where sitcoms and Gulf Wars are sold—for several thousands of dollars per advertising minute— at the same going rate and where politicians count their ratings as carefully as hookers their nightly take...
...Rumor has it that's Thomas Pynchon's favorite TV show," I put in wisely...
...she said...
...Different shuffle, same game...
...I Love Lucy,'" I answered...
Vol. 119 • July 1992 • No. 13
