“Murphy Brown” creator Diane English couldn’t have scripted it better herself. On the day of highly-charged hearings on Capitol Hill, the CBS revival’s premiere episode featured none other than one of the most highly-charged political figures of the time: Hillary Clinton.
“Well, we didn’t expect that to be our lead-in,” English told Vulture. “We moved our #MeToo episode from airing in fourth place to airing now in third place, because it’s so strongly in the zeitgeist right now. Even more than ever because of the hearings, we felt like we wanted to take advantage of that.”
English also explained how Clinton’s cameo came about — it was star Candice Bergen’s idea when the script called for Murphy to interview a new secretary.
“She said, ‘You know who would be a great secretary? Hillary Clinton.’ And I thought, Oh, that’s a genius idea,” English said.
“Then we started a campaign. I have good friends who work very closely with her. I ran one of her PACs during the 2016 campaign. So we reached out and we sent her the script. It had to go through many hands. She really liked it, and then it was a matter of making it work in the schedule, which was the difficult part.”
Clinton’s cameo was filmed separately from the rest of the episode, on a closed set with no live audience (to avoid spoilers).
And the former Secretary of State and presidential candidate didn’t even flinch at a reference to emails.
“She’s totally up for making fun of herself,” English noted. “So that was delightful that she didn’t ask for that to be removed.”
Perhaps now that Clinton seems to have left the political stage, Hollywood is next?
“She’s got great comic timing,” the creator raved. “We thought we were going to have to do a little more direction than we did, but she just nailed it.”
