YMMV / Murphy Brown

• Anvilicious: Several reviews accuse the 2018 relaunch of leaning far too heavily on "clapter," ie the audience responds more because they agree with a line's political point than because it's funny, with Murphy being turned into an Invincible Hero who always has the perfect comeback to win any argument.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the episode where we meet Miles' radical left-wing activist parents, one of the reasons Miles claims his childhood was so miserable was because his parents didn't let him join the Boy Scouts due to his parents considering them a "fascist organization." Considering the later controversies involving the Scouts' discrimination against homosexuals and atheists, one wonders if they were Right for the Wrong Reasons.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • After the show ended, we now know who Deep Throat was, as Phil famously knew back when it was an infamous secret.
  • Thanks to some of his antics around and since the 2012 Republican Primaries, Newt Gingrich of all people became one of the few frequent targets of the show to remain relevant in the 2010s.
  • After Murphy's attempt to get an interview with the recently instated President Clinton goes horribly wrong, the Secret Service informs her that she is is banned from speaking to the President for the next "four, maybe eight years" after which she can "discuss the matter with President Gore... Or so he thinks."
• Moment of Awesome:
  • The entire Murphy vs. Dan Quayle saga really has to be seen to be believed. Even though, if Quayle hadn't mentioned the show, no one would likely have known Quayle had even given the speech except for the people who were there to hear it. Irony: Ten years after the controversy, Candice Bergen admitted that Dan Quayle had a point. (At least in the sense that she understood the speech as being "about fathers not being dispensable, and nobody agreed with that more than I did.")
  • The first episode is a strong character introduction: Murphy comes back from rehab revitalized and ready to go, but doubts herself interviewing someone having an affair with a public figure...until she sees that someone coming into her studio with an entourage and legal team, after which she unleashes full force. Sitting at home later, she's quietly satisfied with herself.
  • Stuart Best's epic angry rant to the FYI team at Murphy's house was pretty awesome, especially since every one of his points was accurate.
  • The 2018 relaunch comes out of the gate swinging as Murphy responds to Donald Trump's Twitter attacks on her. "Bring it on. #DanQuayle!" Becomes somewhat Harsher in Hindsight after the revival's one-season failure.
• Older Than They Think: The revival series used their fictional "Wolf Network" as a rather obvious stand in for the real life Fox News Channel, but the show referencing a Wolf Network actually predates Fox News entirely. The network first appeared in the episode "Contractions" which features Murphy's contract with FYI expiring and being lured away by the head of Wolf to spearhead their fledgling news division (this was a reference to the FOX Broadcasting Network, which debuted a few years prior in 1987.) The episode aired in 1991, five years before Fox News went on-air in 1996.
• Replacement Scrappy: Miles Silverberg, the executive producer of FYI appointed during Murphy's stay at Betty Ford and who was the perfect foil for Murphy, left at the end of the eighth season after his actor Grant Shaud left the show, and his character was replaced during Season 9 by Kay Carter-Shepley (Lily Tomlin). Kay wasn't well-received by pretty much anyone, as she did not have a background in journalism but instead had made a career as a producer of game shows.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The episode "FYI on Q&A", features a very young Phil LaMarr and Adam Goldberg as rival contestants.
  • "Terror on the 17th Floor" featured Kevin Conroy.
• Unintentional Period Piece: A major reason why the series struggled to find any kind of life in syndication until it became old enough to be enjoyed as a nostalgia piece. Since so much of the series' humor is based around poking fun at the news of the day, audiences who don't remember smaller details of American politics at the time the episode aired may struggle to follow along. Why is this episode making so much hay about Bill Clinton getting a haircut anyways?
  • The revival series didn't fare a whole lot better, especially considering the series had frequent criticisms of the Trump administration and said administrations notoriously high turnaround of various positions. The most clear example would likely be the episode "I (Don't) Heart Huckabee," which involved a clash between Murphy and then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. They lucked out a little since Sanders was actually the longest-tenured of Trump's Press Secretaries, but even so, she left the job within a year of the episode airing.
• Values Dissonance: Given how far the American public's opinion of the news media has fallen in the last two decades, the portrayal of it here as a proud, noble organization may seem strange to modern viewers. The relaunch tackles this head-on, with Murphy going back to work to try to make the news respectable again.

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