Word: bergen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...basic answer was easy: Murphy Brown does not exist. She is the TV character played by Candice Bergen. Murphy is a blond media anchor-goddess and wiseguy and now a defiantly unmarried madonna. In last week's episode she delivered a baby boy -- the boy being played by a seven-week-old girl named Danica Fascella. (A perfect Murphy Brown, post-Quayle touch: Danica and her twin Cynthia were conceived in vitro and carried to term by a surrogate mother.) In triumphant autonomy, Murphy will raise the child as a single parent...
...mostly the show is pretentious and annoying. TV sitcoms are rarely models of subtlety, but few are acted and directed with such in-your-face coarseness. Candice Bergen, a two-time Emmy winner (in years when the Golden Girls were apparently snoozing), has anything but a light comic touch. Listening to her labored, overemphatic line readings is like watching someone slog through a swamp in combat boots. Faith Ford, as dippy anchorwoman Corky Sherwood-Forrest (a character married off just to create a funny name!), shrieks her way through scenes as if she were trying to be heard above...
...levels -- nostalgic and scholarly. A Woody Allen TV special from 1969, for example, provides a rare glimpse of Allen in his transitional phase from stand-up comic to film innovator. One segment is a brilliantly realized silent-movie short, with Allen as the Chaplinesque hero and a young Candice Bergen as his co-star. But the show's most startling revelation is a guest appearance by the Rev. Billy Graham, who joins Allen for a lighthearted but essentially serious discussion of God, morality and premarital sex. It is fascinating simply because it could never happen on a TV entertainment show...
...movie's repellent jolt came from his look and bulk. Lounging on a street corner with his X-rated face, smirking at the fragile innocence of the lawyer's young daughter, he was a case study of "lewd vagrancy." Leaning his bare-barrel torso into a cringing Polly Bergen (the lawyer's wife), cracking a raw egg in the air and then wiping the semen-like yolk from her shoulders and breasts, caressing her, undressing her with his syrupy threats, slapping her when she can't stop wailing, he was as lurid a demon of predatory sensuality as Hollywood then...
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE. Before there was the astringent Jules Feiffer film about the war between men and women, there was his play -- unproduced in New York until this off-Broadway staging. Instead of Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret, brat packers Judd Nelson, Jon Cryer and Justine Bateman are the stars...