New Murphy Brown will address #MeToo, and the producers address Les Moonves at TCA

In January, when CBS announced that it was reviving Murphy Brown, we noted that the show would be modernizing its investigative journalist action with some bleeding-edge timeliness, as Candice Bergen’s eponymous Murphy Brown would be entering a world of “fake news,” Fox News (called “Wolf Network” in the Murphy-verse), and general attacks on the media. Speaking at a Television Critics Association event today, Murphy Brown executive producer Diane English noted that the revived show would have an episode inspired by #MeToo. “It’s a powerful movement,” English said, adding, “we wanted to do it justice, and the episode title is ‘#MurphyToo.’”

Apparently, the writers had come up with the “#MurphyToo” episode long before the sexual misconduct allegations against CBS CEO Leslie Moonves surfaced at the end of last month from a New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow. The show won’t specifically address the allegations against Moonves, but English said that everybody on the show takes the sexual misconduct allegations “very seriously,” but nobody has had any “negative experiences in that regard” while working at CBS. This all comes from Variety, which also points out that the end of the show’s original run coincided with the beginning of Moonves time at CBS.

English’s comments came shortly after CBS Programming Chief Kelly Kahl offered a similar statement on the allegations against Moonves, reiterating that the network is launching an investigation and adding that “many” of his “female colleagues” have told him that the accusations against Moonves do not “represent their experience at CBS.” After that, Kahl took questions from the TV critics in the audience, nearly all of which—according to The Hollywood Reporter—centered around sexual misconduct at CBS and elsewhere in the entertainment industry.