She’s Raised the Level of Sitcom Enlightenment

Beware of sitcoms that get serious.

Although comedy is a fine way to enlighten and inspire, probably nothing is harder than doing that. You know, how do you make them laugh while making them think, and vice versa?

An elite few have walked the tightrope successfully, as when CBS’ irreverent “MASH” did a relentless scalpel job on war while ennobling the foot soldiers at risk. And in shorter bursts, when NBC’s “Family Ties” took a crack at death, when HBO’s “Dream On” tackled both death and AIDS, and when ABC’s “Ellen” ended last season and began this one as a beacon on being gay.

Most sitcom attempts to blend disparate themes and emotions crash hard, though, their skills failing to match their aspirations. That’s surely the case when inept, artless, trivial comedies are overcome by sudden attacks of relevance and social conscience. And sometimes even when it’s a series as smart and innovative as that CBS classic, “All in the Family,” which once stumbled badly with a script that had Edith Bunker being assaulted by a would-be rapist, although having much more success at injecting deep emotion long afterward in a post-mortem that found Archie mourning Edith’s death.

Next to pass through this turnstile is Candice’s Bergen’s “Murphy Brown,” beginning its 10th season on CBS tonight with its own run at greatness, doing what few others have done by locating the common denominators in public laughter and public service.

The vehicle is Murphy’s breast cancer. Nothing to laugh at, yet a theme handled here with as much wit as wisdom, and lots of both.

In an episode of CBS’ “Cybill” last season, Maryann got a mammogram at the urging of Cybill, but the results were negative, and that was that, end of story.

Thus, what “Murphy Brown” is doing is historic for a sitcom, even one known through the years for its smart-ass topicality and ability to tee off some of the “family values” crowd. As in 1992, when Vice President Dan Quayle loudly hissed the fictional Murphy’s decision to have a child out of wedlock and then to rear the boy, named Avery, as a single parent while continuing her demanding career as a TV journalist. He deployed his criticism of Murphy in a speech about what he said was America’s “poverty of values.”

Given that the mother of his wife, Marilyn, died of breast cancer, perhaps this is one “Murphy Brown” story arc of which Quayle will approve.

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Tonight’s episode opens with Murphy lasting only 39 minutes in the White House advisor’s job she accepted at the end of last season, freeing her to resume starring on “FYI,” the high-profile network newsmagazine where she’d spent two decades getting rich and famous.

The cancer plot begins routinely enough, with the resistant Murphy and Kay (Lily Tomlin), “FYI’s” executive producer, being badgered by Corky (Faith Ford) into getting mammograms. They do it, if only to shut her up. After Kay gets a clean bill, the nurse aims these jolting words at Murphy: “The doctor would like to see you.”

No one will miss the potential life-saving message here to women who are putting off getting mammograms: Don’t wait. Get one now!

Next week’s second episode has Murphy awaiting word on her biopsy, and the following week finds her stifling her worry under a stiff upper lip: “Everything’s gonna be fine. I made it through Bosnia, Beirut and Avery’s second-grade production of ‘Show Boat’; I can make it through this.”

Of special note, though, are responses to her cancer from the rest of “FYI,” ranging from the smothering paternalism of her intense colleague, Frank (Joe Regalbuto), to the free-spirited Corky’s compassionate hug torture. And from the stodgy Jim (Charles Kimbrough) comes a response that seems stiff even for him, perhaps subtly hinting at the stigma still attached to cancer in some quarters.

Meanwhile, Murphy has a decision to make about the two-centimeter tumor. Should she get a lumpectomy or have her entire breast removed? So bring on the doctors. Murphy has not lost her capacity for outrage, in this case spitting fire at the fleet of specialists giving her conflicting advice. She reacts angrily: “I don’t have any answers, and half the information you give me contradicts itself. How is anybody supposed to know what the hell to do? Where is the black or white, the right or wrong, the yes or no?”

By the end of Episode 3, however, Murphy’s mood has lightened, and she is having an hilarious encounter with prosthetic devices, followed a bit later by an amusing chat with Corky and Kay about women’s breasts and their impact on men.

How is “Murphy Brown” able to make this mixed milieu succeed when so many others have failed? Primarily because, despite Murphy’s personal crisis, it stays in character and remains primarily a sitcom, instead of dipping itself totally into the baptismal waters of weightiness and letting the message eclipse the entertainment, as most other sitcoms do when trying to change direction.

Here is that wooden, old-guard newsman Jim in the second episode, for example, being forced by his network to tape news promos for local affiliates: “Hey, Beantown!”

The series also continues to drop political and media names galore. Murphy’s cancer shares time in the second episode, for example, with an “FYI” expose closely resembling “PrimeTime Live’s” probe of the Food Giant grocery chain’s allegedly unsanitary practices, one that culminated in a lawsuit in which a jury found that ABC undercover reporters had committed fraud and trespass.

After spending several years in a creative hollow, “Murphy Brown” is again committing funny, noteworthy, risky television in a season that Bergen maintains will be its last.

Although the first comedy to do so, this is hardly TV’s first program to explore the topic of breast cancer with breadth and sensitivity. And more are now arriving, with October being National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Will lives be saved because of “Murphy Brown”? No one from Los Angeles to Beantown can predict that. However, getting and coping with breast cancer were reasons enough for Murphy to stay around for another 22 episodes.

* “Murphy Brown” airs Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. on CBS (Channel 2).