Stealing the Show Read online

  Hollywood fired back. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, creator of Designing Women (as well as a dear friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton), bristled at Quayle’s suggestion that “people who are in charge of these television shows aren’t really American,” with its echoes of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s un-American witch hunt. “It’s sort of to be expected he’d comment on this fantasy character as a way of solving a real problem. . . . Next [the Bush administration] will be blaming [TV doctor] Doogie Howser, M.D., for the lack of a health care program in this country.”

  During the presidential-election summer of 1992, the term cultural elite spread through America’s public conversation like wildfire. It was a vague but evocative phrase for the kind of liberalism propagated by Hollywood and the mainstream media and on college campuses on the coasts, a set of permissive and relativistic attitudes that conservatives feared was eroding the traditional values of the heartland. As Quayle’s approval ratings spiraled downward, he dug a deeper trench in June, when he made a speech at the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis’s Hoosier Dome. In between denunciations of abortion, sex education, and homosexuality, he positioned the presidential contest as a moral battle between the cultural elite and family values. Cultural elitists lurked in “newsrooms, sitcom studios, and faculty lounges,” Quayle claimed. “I wear their scorn as a badge of honor.”

  That same month, Quayle used the “cultural elites” trope to energize the antiabortion movement, telling the members of the National Right to Life Committee, “I know it can be discouraging playing David to the Goliath of the dominant cultural elite. In Hollywood and elsewhere, your opponents have a lot of money, a lot of glamour, a lot of influence. But we have the power of ideas, the power of our convictions, the power of our beliefs.” Young people in the hall carried posters with the words: MURPHY BROWN DOES NOT SPEAK FOR US . . . BUT DAN QUAYLE DOES.

  The media happily amped up the war of words with articles such as “Is Hollywood Ruining America?” Time featured Candice Bergen on its “Hollywood & Politics” cover, with the headline “Murphy Brown for President.” Meanwhile, Newsweek created an issue devoted to “The Cultural Elite,” formulating a Top 100 list that included Oprah, Madonna, and . . . Dan Quayle.

  Looking back, English now admits it was a “very, very scary” time. Photographers were camped outside her house, and a steady stream of threats came through to her office. “I had constant anonymous phone calls on our office answering machine saying, ‘We want to kill you.’ ” Metal detectors had to be installed to protect the live audience for Murphy Brown, and Bergen was given a full-time security detail. The American Family Association’s Reverend Donald Wildmon called for a boycott of the series and its sponsors by “Americans who are tired of having their values ridiculed.” There was even speculation that Bergen might lose her lucrative contract as spokeswoman for the Sprint telephone network. In the end, the boycott never happened, and Bergen stayed on Sprint’s books for another six years.

  * * *

  Three months after the childbirth episode aired, Murphy Brown triumphantly picked up three Emmy Awards—for Best Comedy Series, Best Actress, and Best Direction. In Bergen’s acceptance speech, she thanked the vice president and the show’s writers “for their words and for spelling them correctly”—a barb slung at Quayle for his embarrassing misspelling of the word potato at a kids’ spelling bee. (Not only did he add a superfluous e at the end but he also corrected a child who’d spelled it right.) Picking up the Best Comedy Series award, English paid homage to the show’s brave sponsors before thanking “all the single parents out there who, either by choice or by necessity, are raising their kids alone. Don’t let anybody tell you you’re not a family.”

  The return of Murphy Brown was almost as eagerly awaited as the answer to Dallas’s infamous “Who killed J.R.?” story line. Would Murphy keep her baby? Would she be a good mother? Would these fictional characters respond to the insults flung at them by real-world politicians? The answer to this last question was an across-the-board, emphatic yes.

  In order to keep the details under wraps, the producers limited access to scripts and shot several versions of a few scenes. English, who had handed the show over to producers Gary Dontzig and Steven Peterman after moving on to other projects, says even she didn’t know how they would handle Murphy’s rebuttal. In “You Say Potatoe, I Say Potato,” Murphy returns to the office in a double-breasted suit, looking as sophisticated and unruffled as ever and bragging about having nailed a mob boss. Then her secretary starts wailing, like a baby, and Murphy wakes up to her real nightmare—that is, life as a single mother coping with an inconsolable infant, Avery, named after her recently deceased mother. When she visits the office briefly to cry on her colleagues’ shoulders, Murphy gets little sympathy. Ever the stiff-upper-lip type, Jim Dial tells her to look on the bright side: “In the old days, a woman bearing a child out of wedlock would’ve been stoned to death!” It is her dear friend Frank, always a model of soft modern masculinity and the product of a large family, who teaches Murphy how to comfort her own baby.

  Murphy is just getting the hang of rocking baby Avery to sleep when the nightly newscaster announces that Dan Quayle has called out Murphy Brown for her “poverty of values” and shows a real news clip. At the FYI offices, her colleagues swap copies of actual newspapers touting “Murphygate.” An enraged Murphy complains to Frank, “I agonized over this decision!” He reminds her that Quayle is a national joke, saying, “Tomorrow he’s probably going to get his head stuck in his golf bag, and you’ll be old news.” The final nail in the Quayle coffin comes when Murphy herself addresses the issue from her pulpit at FYI. Flanked by single-parent families, she somberly intones that, in these difficult times, we could hold Congress responsible, or an administration that’s been in power for twelve years . . . “or we could blame me.” She chides Quayle for his narrow definition of family values and calls on him to realize that “families come in all shapes and sizes.” The episode ends with an ever-mischievous Murphy dumping a truckload of potatoes on the vice president’s lawn.

  Two and a half decades later, sitting in her cozy Pacific Palisades living room, Siamis has her own theory about the furor. Going back through old scripts from early seasons, she realized something, she says: “We did a Dan Quayle joke every week. We didn’t set out to do that, but we were commenting on what was going on in the world, and he would just tee them up. They were always smart jokes . . . but we were relentless!” She shakes her head. “He had his feelings hurt.”

  Bush and Quayle lost the election to Clinton that fall. English sent the new commander in chief a congratulatory telegram, telling him, “You’re not really president until Murphy Brown does its first Bill Clinton joke.” She recalls that he responded by inviting her to the inauguration, saying, “All your fans helped get me elected.” And, of course, the Quayle controversy helped the series: Advertising Age estimated that ad prices went up more than 100 percent from the previous season, and the ratings soared. The birth episode lured seventy million viewers, and Murphy finished the season as the third-most-watched show of the year.

  * * *

  Murphy Brown was English’s brainchild, but she was eager to move on. Since season two, she and Joel Shukovsky had been trying to negotiate a better deal with the studio. “We had even approved a press release that CBS was going to put out in April saying we would not be coming back to the show,” English told a reporter in 1990. “Without us, there was no Murphy Brown. And we saw the network coming out way ahead of us.”

  Shukovsky “had a very big vision,” says Barnet Kellman, who remains in close contact with most of the original Murphy Brown team. “Joel recognized how few people have a second big hit. Even though he felt Diane was a towering talent—and he was right—he thought there was a time limit, the clock was ticking.”

  In the tradition of husband-and-wife TV empires like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s Desilu and Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker’s MTM, the couple wanted their
own production company, Shukovsky English Entertainment, to create shows for which they controlled the rights and would reap the rewards of syndication (where the real TV money lies). Looking back, English says that Joel was eager to “break out of the Warner Bros. crib” because many of the production duties he wanted to perform were taken care of by their studio. He got to be in casting sessions and read scripts, she says, “but, really, Murphy was my deal. I was really running the whole thing, and he was just being patient and waiting for the next one.”

  The next one was Love & War, a rom-com starring Susan Dey (of Partridge Family and L.A. Law) and Jay Thomas (a Murphy Brown regular) as an oddball couple who bore some resemblance to English and Shukovsky. “I was in a solid relationship where the balance of power was constantly shifting and required attention,” English told the New York Times before the show premiered, “and it seemed like a lot of women were trying to figure out how to take everything we had gained in the last decade and maintain that in a relationship.”

  Love & War was part of a four-series, two-movie contract that was said to be worth forty million dollars, with Shukovsky English finally in control of production. Shukovsky’s attitude seemed to rub some in the industry the wrong way, however. When Shukovsky English replaced staffers on the Love & War pilot with a nonunion crew, a media tempest ensued. An unapologetic Shukovsky protested, “You don’t need four guys to run a camera. You can do it with one person with the right equipment—and do you know how much coffee and paper cups you can save that way?” Love & War was canceled after three seasons. Several subsequent Shukovsky English comedies faltered, including Double Rush, starring Robert Pastorelli; the Louie Anderson vehicle The Louie Show; and Living in Captivity, a multiracial comedy about a gated community, whose writers’ room included a young Matthew Weiner and several staffers who would go on to write for Weiner’s show Mad Men, among them Lisa Albert and Janet Leahy. A regime change at Fox knocked it off the network schedule partway through its first season.

  Shukovsky’s fantasy of a Diane English sitcom empire never did come to pass, although their partnership continued for years afterward. (They divorced in 2012.) English spent fourteen years pursuing her dream project: a remake of the all-female classic The Women, the Clare Boothe Luce play previously made into a George Cukor movie. She worked on the script as directors came and went and studios passed on the project. “There was a tremendous fear that an all-female cast, not bolstered by Tom Hanks or Will Smith, would never be able to make any money at the box office,” she told a reporter at the time. English eventually raised the money, wrote the screenplay, and directed the film herself, with Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Candice Bergen, and Carrie Fisher in the ensemble. Finally released in 2008, the movie was panned by many critics but did decently at the box office. English continued to write screenplays (including a film designed around the perspective of the first female president’s husband) and television pilots for the likes of HBO.

  * * *

  Murphy Brown carried on in its creator’s absence, but as ratings started to droop, English was invited back a few seasons later to consult. “I think they were really feeling the burden of trying to figure out how this baby thing worked,” she recalls. “Women loved Murphy because she wasn’t a mom and she wasn’t a wife and she wasn’t all those traditional things. The trick was to keep her Murphy while she was being a mom. But the writers were all young parents just having babies themselves, and I think some of the scenes with Murphy and her baby became a different kind of Murphy, and people sensed that . . .” English pauses. “People loved her for what she started out as. They didn’t want her to change.”

  Yet over the show’s run, Murphy did change, facing one of her most daunting transformations in season ten. English had agreed to come back as showrunner for the final year, and found her creation had mutated into something she almost didn’t recognize. “The comedy had gotten so broad that I wanted to bring it back to its roots a little bit, so we came up with: well, what if she got breast cancer?” English and the writing staff spoke to a lot of cancer survivors, listening out for the funny details amid the heartbreak. The show’s infamous marijuana episode, in which straitlaced Jim procures pot for Murphy in a Washington, DC, park and the whole FYI team tokes up, remains for English “a perfect example of how you could take such a serious subject and find humor and social commentary in it.”

  At the end of the show’s run, Bergen called her time as Murphy “a great liberation for me—in the way it liberated people watching it. I loved playing a woman who didn’t take [crap] from anybody. All of us hate the part of ourselves that forces us to do that. And even when we don’t take it, our retorts are never the quality of Murphy’s. We don’t have an A-level team of writer-producers writing our rejoinders.”

  Just as Murphy became a polarizing symbolic figure in the culture wars, her creator became something of an icon in her own right, even appearing in a Hanes panty hose ad campaign featuring career women in the early nineties. TV showrunners and writers rarely achieved household recognition status back then, let alone female showrunners. Yet it would turn out that Murphy Brown and Diane English were just the beginning of a twin-threat transformation of the television status quo: a foretaste of a future in which unabashedly bold women took the lead on-screen and powerful women called the shots behind the scenes.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  From Rage to Riches:

  Roseanne Barr and Roseanne

  Roseanne’s working-class heroines Roseanne Barr and Laurie Metcalf on set during the filming of season one.

  A family sits around a cluttered kitchen table, arguing and roughhousing. Finally, the man at the table leans over to smooch his wife. She cheerfully wipes off the kiss, letting loose a peal of bawdy laughter.

  That was how America met the Conner family on October 18, 1988. In its minute-long opening sequence, Roseanne conveys a concrete sense of this rambunctious working-class household. There are bills on the table that are probably overdue, and kids interrupting as their parents shrug them off. There are dowdy clothes and bad hair and faded wallpaper. But most of all, there is that glorious laugh of Roseanne’s hanging in the air, a perfect chord of raucousness and affection. It signals a family life bound by love but not muddied by sentimentality.

  Roseanne was an instant hit: watched by more than twenty-one million viewers, the debut episode beat the World Series game it was up against (LA Dodgers versus Oakland A’s) to win the night’s ratings. By the end of the season, it had become the country’s number two prime-time series, topped only by another family sitcom, The Cosby Show.

  Although there was a small but well-loved lineage of classic comedies set in ordinary American homes, from The Honeymooners to All in the Family, Roseanne depicted a family more real than any seen on television before. Sunk deep in middle American mundanity, the show emphasized the “working” in working class. Roseanne and hubby Dan toil at jobs that are often menial, yet hard to keep. He cobbles together a living with drywall jobs; she works in a plastics factory. A summons from her kids’ school means Roseanne has to leave work early and lose money; an unexpectedly small paycheck might result in disaster. If they are lucky, they’ll scrape together enough cash to keep the lights on this month. Everything in the Conners’ life is a compromise: there will be no matching living room furniture, no top-tier education for their kids, no time for Roseanne to work on the novel she dreams of writing.

  The show’s originality resided above all in the character of Roseanne herself. No television sitcom had ever revolved around such a fierce, sharp-tongued virago before. Take the scene in the first episode in which five women sit around a table during their break from the assembly line at the plastics factory, talking trash about men. One of the workers picks up a chocolate donut and quips, “A guy is a lump, like this donut. Okay. So, first, you gotta get rid of all this stuff his mom did to him.” She flicks toppings off the donut’s surface. “Then you gotta
get rid of all that macho crap that they pick up from the beer commercials. And then, there’s my personal favorite, the male ego,” she says, devouring a chunk of the donut with a mischievous wrinkle of her nose.

  That donut crusher? It’s Roseanne. There is power not just in what her on-screen character says but also in the harsh quality of Barr’s voice itself. Rarely had such a caustic tone been heard in prime time, one that regularly expressed such brazen resentment toward her duties as homemaker and mother. “I put in eight hours a day at the factory and then I come home and put in another eight hours . . . And you don’t do nothin’!” she rails at Dan in the debut episode. Roseanne was already spelling out the feminist concept of women’s “second shift,” even while making it wonderfully obvious that this on-screen marriage was grounded in deep wells of mutual respect.

  And then there was Roseanne’s physical appearance: had such a large, unglamorous woman ever been the star of a prime-time show before? Lucille Ball frumped herself up for her deliriously loony jobs, such as her brief stint in the chocolate factory—but even working the assembly line, she never took off her lipstick and pearls. Ball had been a showgirl and movie star before creating this platform for herself; the mismatch between her conventional cuteness and her wacky facial expressions and hijinks was a big part of what made I Love Lucy so funny.

  Barr was an altogether different beast, one whose own journey to Hollywood had included stints in a mental hospital, a commune, and a feminist bookstore, and as a stay-at-home suburban mother. Her very presence on TV as a plus-size woman who was confidently sexual and comfortable in her own skin was a rebuke to the body-obsessed, aerobics-addled eighties culture.