DE-ZONKING MURPHY BROWN

"I'm sorry I don't talk like Murphy Brown."

Jessica "Jess" Day

'New Girl'

You'll notice I didn't put the name "Murphy Brown" in quotation marks. Well, I did there, but not before. Never mind. Keep reading.

I love shows which have the main characters' names as the titles - 'Murphy Brown', 'Barnaby Jones', 'Columbo', 'McCloud', 'Maverick', 'Kevin Hill', 'Cheyenne', etc. etc. etc. Because when another TV character mentions such a character, we can make the claim that it's the character being mentioned as a real person and it's not a reference to the show's title.

Murphy Brown is a great example. As a well-known news-woman who may still be the co-anchor of the news magazine show 'F.Y.I.', she'd be familiar to everybody, including Jess Day. And being on TV, Murphy's voice would be familiar enough for Jess to make comparisons. (This holds true whether she was referring to the timbre of Murphy's voice or to quality of what she had to say.)

And the Adorkable One didn't have to watch 'F.Y.I.' (just in case it was canceled before she was old enough to watch), because two TV series were created about Murphy Brown within the reality of Toobworld. One was a fictionalized version of her life, entitled 'Kelly Green'; while the other one was an "as seen on TV" recreation of her life starring Candice Bergen. (Cosmo Kramer of 'Seinfeld' appeared in an episode as the latest in the long line of secretaries working for Murph.)

But as for the show we watched, that was part of the Toobworld Dynamic, depicting the actual life of Murphy Brown.)

So, F.Y.I., no matter the source of Jess' knowledge, we know there was no Zonk!

BCnU!