Date of airing: December 11, 1988 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 19.6 million viewers, 14.0/21 in Households
written by: Diane English
directed by: Barnet Kellman
Well, this episode went somewhere sitcoms usually do not go. Three annoying, but not so dumb kids are being placed on Murphy’s doormat, and that because their mother could not handle taking care of them any longer, either because the pressure of being a mom to three unruly kids can be terrifying, or because the Christmas holidays made her too melancholic to handle anyone but herself for a couple of days. But because this was essentially a Christmas episode, the kids' mother came back, she reunited and brought them back home, and Murphy proved for the first time that she had a heart of gold.
That is a story you would expect in shows like ER and JUDGING AMY, but seeing them in a multi-camera sitcom? I do not know if this episode was the beginning of MURPHY BROWN becoming a more serious show that does not care for the punchline or comedic chops of its cast members (and honestly, I do not think that any of the cast members so far successfully delivered their comedic chops in these five episodes, although the scripts helped in making them seem funny), or if this was something of a slip because Diane English wanted to write a sitcom that was not only a sitcom in the general sense. Considering the long running time of the show (it aired for ten years plus a revival season, and it became a cornerstone in 1990s feminist pop culture), it is imaginable that the show went through some major changes in its lifetime – at one point it simply had to care for its characters, or the viewers would not have tuned in for ten years straight. I can see that the dramatic aspect of the setting might be one of those changes, or at least an early element of the show that was kept by the writers and employed on a regular basis.
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| He will have great hair in the morning after the ice cream care. |
Do not get me wrong, I liked the story, but it did feel unnatural for it to be in a sitcom that has not figured out what it wants to be yet (a workplace comedy or a sitcom with dramatic elements?). And that was especially noticeable at the end, when the kids' mother came back to pick up her children. There was some sizable drama in the story, ready to be laid bare for the audience to witness and for Murphy to react to, but the episode, possibly because the show is still a sitcom and did not have more than 24 minutes available to get its story straight, had no time to get deeper into the story of the mother and her decision to leave her kids with Murphy.
While I was thinking how a mother could just drop off her kids and disappear like that, and come back the next day and claim her kids without having to answer any questions to authorities, I started to remember again that this was still a sitcom, and the writers thought this was a light and funny idea to put into the script and have audiences enjoy the sentimentality of it, by Murphy becoming a softer, more likable person. The episode created an event that was so dramatic that it could have filled an entire ER episode. But MURPHY BROWN made it part of a sitcom and about Murphy only, but she was not the mother who just surrendered her three kids to a stranger.
I did like how the kids became involved with almost every other character in the show. Frank and Corky happened to be naturals around them, making them more likable characters. Even more so than Murphy, who explicitly stated she hates kids – which I hope is a line remembered later in the show, when it is necessary to get into what Murphy likes or does not like about kids and why she does not want to have any of them. Heck, even Jim had reason to believe he would be liked by the kids when he started to tell them a Christmas story. I almost would have wished for there to not have been a comedic scene, because watching Jim be something of a random father figure was neat – a picture that became rotten when one of the kids dropped the ice cream cone on his head. By the way, the scene would have been funnier if Jim had not just told the kids a generic Christmas story, but the story he was working on for FYI, only "Christmas-fied."
What a shame that the episode did not find the time to get Miles in with the kids somehow. Considering he is the youngest of the crew, there could have been a joke about how he was closer to the kids in playful agility, reminding the characters that Miles is sometimes too young to be seen as the executive producer of a television show. Then again, this is the fifth episode of MURPHY BROWN, and Miles has already proven himself to be a capable character – throwing that out for 30 minutes to make him something of a kids again would have been weird to see.
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| The house is empty and calm, which makes for a sad holiday. |
And the rest of the episode? Eldin made himself more useful and a better character, and he even stepped foot into Murphy’s career world, which is something I never thought would happen. The character always looked and sounded like someone who would only be part of Murphy’s home life (becoming her live-in man without having to be in a romantic or otherwise intimate relationship with her). On the other hand, I would not mind if Eldin and Murphy were to hook up. So far they do not consider themselves as love interests, so it might be fun to just see them in a casual "friends with benefits" relationship. For a 1980s sitcom, that would be mindblowing.
