Top Ten Episodes of Season Ten
https://jacksonupperco.com/2017/04/18/the-ten-best-murphy-brown-episodes-of-season-ten/
Well, we’ve finally reached the tenth and final season of Murphy Brown, and following the continued qualitative descent we’ve tracked over the past few weeks, this year feels like the best we’ve seen in a while. After all, in the history of Murphy Brown, I’ve posited that there’ve only been two other years that improved upon their direct predecessors, disrupting what’s otherwise been a straightforward downward slope – the second, which I believe is the strongest (when character knowingness met novelty), and the sixth, which took pains to reverse course after a disastrously unenjoyable and problematically political fifth season that came during the peak of the series’ popularity and, sadly, got to define its post-run reputation – of being both “dated” and “good-but-not-great.” One of the primary themes that I wanted to explore in coverage of Murphy Brown – mostly because, while I love the series in spite of its flaws, I needed some kind of angle to help contextualize my otherwise harsh, unrelenting critiques – is the reasons why the series hasn’t stayed as popular as its other long-running sitcom contemporaries. For instance, Married… With Children (which we’ve just covered), left the FOX airwaves in 1997 after an 11-season run — but it remains beloved by a large fan base. Of course, this is both because and why the series, unlike Murphy Brown, is heavily syndicated and can be purchased in full on DVD. Ditto for Seinfeld (coverage of which begins next week), which ran for nine seasons and also concluded, like Murphy Brown, in the spring of ’98. Now, it may seem odd to compare Seinfeld to Murphy Brown from our current vantage point – one is often credited as a classic, and the other seldom is – but they’re contemporaries, and, actually, the latter was recognized twice by the Television Academy as the Outstanding Comedy, while Seinfeld only got that honor once. (Okay, that’s not exactly a fair metric; Frasier proved to be a durable dynamo — stay tuned for January 2018…) So whatever happened to the, at the very least, once popular Murphy Brown?