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Murphy Brown pulled no punches with Thursday’s night’s episode, “Beat the Press.” As the title suggests, the episode focused on President Trump’s contentious relationship with the media, and it featured a storyline about Frank Fontana (Joe Regalbuto) getting badly beaten at a presidential rally. According to Murphy Brown creator Diane English, who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter after the episode aired, the plotline was inspired by Trump’s repeated insistence that the press is “the enemy of the people,” a stance that the writers feel can only end in “somebody really [getting] hurt.”
Rather than stage an actual Trump rally, Murphy Brown shows Murphy (Candice Bergen) and Avery (Jake McDorman) watching at home as Trump’s voice — the sitcom hired someone to voice the president, Entertainment Weekly reports — blared through the TV. “Anybody catch old Murphy on TV this morning?” the fake Trump says. “Yes, she was at it again sitting there with her flunky friends, telling their big lies, planting their fake stories about our great country.”
Murphy more or less ignores him, but when “Trump” singles out her colleague Frank, she’s forced to pay attention. “I hear old Murphy’s partner in crime, fibbing Frank Fontana is here tonight,” he says. “Where is he? There he is. See him? That’s right. Let fibbin’ Frank know what you think of him. Maybe a good body slam. What do you say?” Murphy changes the channel in disgust, but a few minutes later, she receives a phone call and learns that Frank was assaulted by Trump supporters at the rally.
Cut to the hospital, where Frank lies with a swollen eye, arm sling, and cuts and bruises. Frank explained that he left the press pen to interview some rally guests, and suddenly he was “surrounded by a sea of red hats,” all of whom had been whipped into a frenzy by Trump’s call to “body slam” him. “I guess when you major in journalism these days you have to minor in kickboxing,” Murphy joked half-heartedly.
Later, Avery tries to track down someone involved in the fight, and he finds the woman who threw the first punch. “He had it coming. He’s fake news. He’s the enemy of the people,” the woman says. Avery, who works for a Fox News-esque news outlet, rips the Trump supporter for her answer. “He’s a journalist. He was just there to cover the rally. That’s what the free press does,” he says. “That’s what separates a democracy from a dictatorship. Or maybe a dictatorship is what you’d prefer.” Avery then proceeds to get the shit kicked out of him.
Murphy Brown creator Diane English says the writers came up with the idea back in May, but after watching the president “encourage” hateful rhetoric and say that “he admires somebody who could body-slam a journalist,” they doubled down. “We pushed our episode a little farther than I think we intended it originally, because the feeling was pretty much that if it continues like this, somebody is really going to get hurt,” she said. “It’s really, very frightening to me.”
