As a Gen Xer, I'm used to being underrepresented in all ways and in all areas of life etc., but the erasure of the entirety of Gen X in this reboot season (compared to Roseanne/The Conners, because how can you not compare?) is so insane it not only soured me on these new episodes but sullied my formerly fond memories of the original series. So much of these eps' attempts at non-political humor (I'm reviewing the whole season) hinge on hamfisted scenarios wherein Boomers don't understand Twitter and Millennials have never seen a cellular flip phone, etc. The new characters (Murphy's son Avery all grown up, Pat Patel the 25-year-old gay Indian dude from Ohio who is of course running FYI 2.0's social media, and Miguel the undocumented DACA college student) are all Millennials; except for Tyne Daly, of course, who is both yet another Boomer and-for better or worse-not written as anything more than a female fill-in for the OG Phil character. You don't populate a 13-episode fictional contemporary America with ZERO Gen X characters by accident. Miles, the only OG Murphy Brown character who's close enough to the Gen X bracket that he's more Gen X than not (certainly not a Boomer or a Millennial), is the only OG character who hasn't mellowed with age. He has no partner, no kids, and he's somehow almost as highstrung today as he was when starting his career in television 30 years ago. The fact that Miles has continued his career as a TV producer from when we last saw him is all we know really about his life. So why hasn't he mellowed with age, just like Murphy and Frank who were also different flavors of neurotic when we last saw them in the 90s? I'm guessing Miles 2.0 is written as this shockingly improbable 30-year-veteran TV producer who is both perpetually successful and insecure at work because-whether it was a conscious choice or just a consequence of lazy storytelling-this show only 'works' if it denies the existence not only of factual Gen X Americans but also any Gen X perspective or sensibility. If there was a central character onscreen whose lived experience made it impossible for them to be straightforwardly amused by self-obsessed Millennials confounding self-obsessed Boomers and vice versa, what would the writers have them do? Groan periodically? Better to just not write them at all, apparently. The only thing that might have offset the offness of this sustained erasure of all things not Boomer-v-Millennial would have been some of the great apolitical weirdness that made the original series fun. It wasn't all social commentary, remember? This reboot made me sad. It's hard not to look back now on all of Murphy Brown and think, hey, was it always just about giving bourgeois Mother Jones-reading white Boomers a pass on whatever they decided activism was that week? (I'm thinking yes.)
Review of Fake News
