MEdia: How Murphy Brown Shaped Me

Three lessons I learned from watching Murphy Brown

I feel like I came of age in the golden age of feminist television. I think about the many shows featuring incredible women that aired right around the time I was in high school and college. One of my favorite shows was Murphy Brown.

Source: Deadline

Murphy Brown, played by the gorgeous, raspy voiced Candice Bergen, was an investigative reporter for the fictional news program FYI. She worked with stoic anchor Jim Dial (Charles Kimbrough), energetic reporter Frank Fontana (Joe Regalbuto), bubbly Corky Sherwood (Faith Ford), and nervous Miles Silverberg (Grant Shaud). The show starts with Murphy returning to work after a stint at the Betty Ford Clinic where she went to rehab for her alcoholism.

Murphy Brown (and a lot of other shows that aired at this time) bridged the time between second and third wave feminism. Second wave feminism was born of women like Betty Friedan and while it certainly brought about some results for women, it was an intensely white kind of feminism and it ultimately failed because it never harnessed the power of ALL women. That is definitely apparent in these shows. They all center white women with lots of privilege. 

But as we saw the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment and the rise of the Moral Majority, it was clear that feminism needed to change. Kimberle Crenshaw began speaking about intersectionality and the ways that various struggles intersect and overlap and that it is impossible to achieve equality in one area while ignoring inequality in others. And I believe we began to see some of that in these shows as well. The stories that were told were definitely through the lens of WASPy, well off women, but they included stories that were outside of that box.