Murphy Brown

Murphy Brown returns to the fictional newsmagazine FYI fresh out of the Betty Ford Center, and she has no intention of being humbled by it. She's a star investigative journalist, brilliant and abrasive, allergic to sentimentality, and openly contemptuous of anyone she considers less rigorous than herself, which is nearly everyone.

Candice Bergen plays her with a comic ferocity that never asks to be liked, which is exactly why audiences liked her so much. The writing lets a woman be difficult, ambitious and funny without softening her into someone's wife or mother first, and Bergen's timing turns Murphy's contempt into the show's engine rather than its obstacle.