Murphy Brown's #MeToo episode was equally careful and cartoonish

The Atlantic

The "#MurphyToo" episode airing Thursday offered a nuanced take on the #MeToo movement, says Megan Garber. Yet she says the episode arrived amid a revival season that has featured cringey jokes that have come at the expense of women, including one joke implying that women who are sexually harassed are weak. "The episode devotes a relatively nuanced plot line about sexual violence to its white, rich, famous, powerful protagonist," says Garber. "All around that storyline, however—in the earlier episodes of the Murphy reboot, and in the rest of the '#MurphyToo' episode itself—sexism and harassment as broader phenomena are treated, largely, as jokes. Frank treats the new awareness about the prevalence of sexual harassment as an inconvenience. Corky’s lifetime worth of experiences with that harassment manifest, in the show, as quirky anecdotes. Miles is attracted to a woman who works for him, and can’t stop asking her, the Id being what it is, to keep him 'abreast' of professional developments. The studio audience laughs and laughs. Here it all is, in one 30-minute package: progress and backlash. Empathy and its impediments. A culture that wants to be better—and a culture that, despite it all, isn’t." ALSO: "#MurphyToo" episode felt more like it was working through a checklist than revealing much of any new insight.