Author: Daniel D’Addario / Source: Variety

For a show that’s centered around a world-renowned and hugely accomplished journalist, “” 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” 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…
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