Murphy Brown

Murphy Brown was an American situation comedy which aired on CBS from November 14, 1988 to May 18, 1998. It starred Candice Bergen as Murphy Brown, an investigative journalist and news anchor for FYI, a fictional newsmagazine.

Running Gags

• The show did not have a theme song, but instead many episodes began with a Motown song whose lyrics were somehow relevant to the plot of the episode.
• For a few seasons, Corky Sherwood was known as "Corky Sherwood Forrest" after marrying a writer named Will Forrest in the show's 1989-1990 season. They eventually divorced. Corky later married Miles Silverberg.
• While the other news anchors produced many serious news stories, Corky's running gag was that her stories were frivolous. Examples included a retrospective on Bert Parks, where to take one's cat while one goes on vacation, and "a dinner with the Van Patten family."
• The network regularly sent Murphy incompetent secretaries, with a different secretary in almost every episode. On one occasion, her secretary was a crash test dummy. On another occasion, it was Carol (Marcia Wallace) from The Bob Newhart Show, who proved really good at the job but quit when Bob Hartley (Bob Newhart) showed up and begged her to come back to his office. In the show's final season, the secretaries were played by celebrities, including Bette Midler, Don Rickles, Rosie O'Donnell, Sally Field, Laura Kightlinger, Cecily Adams and Julie Brown. Over the course of the series, 93 different secretaries appeared in all.