Needs more subtlety, less sledgehammer...
Okay, so I watched my first ep of this update. First... Faith Ford. Is she a vampire? Has a pact with the Devil? She looks exactly the same whereas the rest of the cast look... greyer... and puffier.
Now my complaint... this was the ep where the news crew struggle with whether to have a controversial former White House senior advisor on the show. The character is a thinly disguised Steve Bannon. In the end, Brown refuses to have him on the show.
The ep ends with Murphy Brown essentially insulting the guy personally as he lays out his point of view. She hits all the checkmarks: He's white. He's privileged. He's racist. His views are those of a dinosaur on its way out. Blah, blah, blah...
As a moderate Liberal, the whole episode left me cold. This is NOT the way to sway and influence the other side. At no point, did Murphy Brown actually address his arguments. She just metaphorically calls him an asshole.
This is a great way to further harden positions.
What was needed was the script writing skills of someone like Aaron Sorkin. Although he's well-known as a Hollywood liberal, his most noble characters (President Bartlett of The West Wing, Andrew Shepard of The American President) are known for expressing their views in the face of their opponents through a combination of moral indignation while appealing to the nobility in humanity.
I'll give this series another chance, but, if this is going to be the ongoing tone of it, I won't let the door hit me on the way out.