Somewhere in America, we have to assume that Dan Quayle just felt a tiny shiver in his personal potatoes, as CBS announced today that it was finally Murphy Brown’s turn to get the inevitable TV revival treatment. The series—which ran for 247 episodes on the network throughout the 1990s, scoring 18 Emmy wins across its run—has been granted a 13-episode commitment to return, with star Candice Bergen front and center to bring FYI News and its star investigative journalist, Murphy Brown, back to the airwaves.
20 years out from its series finale, Murphy Brown has faded in the public memory, reduced to Family Guy jokes, Paul Reubens anecdotes, and that time Kramer played her secretary on Seinfeld. At the time, though, it was a groundbreaking series, not just for the famous plotline in which Murphy decided to become a single mother—earning Quayle’s poorly spelled wrath in the process—but also for being a blatantly political TV sitcom with an uncompromising, funny, peerlessly competent woman at its center.
And while we normally look a bit askance at these nostalgia-powered revival projects, the thought of Bergen (and the show’s original creator, Diane English) taking on the modern media landscape—fake news, Fox News, Trump, and all—carries an actual thrill of anticipation with it. Meanwhile, CBS is apparently working to try to recruit the rest of the show’s original cast to join this revival project, as well.