“Looking around at what was going on in our world and our country, I was feeling that if ever a show had a reason to come back, it would be this,” says legendary TV show-runner Diane English, waving her hands as if to suggest Trumpian malice vibrating around us. We are sitting in a swelteringly hot production office on the Warner Bros. back lot in Burbank, where English is relaunching Murphy Brown, the sitcom about a Waspy and waspish investigative journalist that became central to the culture wars of the early 1990s. Chances are good that the CBS revival, starring Candice Bergen in the ornery lead role once again, will become the show that deplorables love to deplore. It might even trigger a few fiery tweets from the White House.

There would be precedent. The topical humor of Murphy Brown, mining politics for entertainment, originally attracted viewers of all ideological stripes and created fodder for a real-life line of attack from a sitting vice president. In other words, it anticipated the political reality of 2018 by a generation or so.

“In Washington, everybody on both sides of the aisle watched that show,” English says, recalling how Republican senators like Orrin Hatch and Arlen Specter sent her head shots. “There weren’t DVRs then, so you had to be in front of your TV, and I was told that the Beltway emptied out on Mondays at nine o’clock.”

English and Bergen had occasionally joked about remaking Murphy Brownover the years, such as when Sarah Palin was a vice-presidential candidate. Murphy, after all, had a knack for calling out hypocrisy and idiocy. But it wasn’t until after the 2016 election that English seriously entertained the idea. When Warner Bros. approached her about it, she procrastinated for months, delivering a script right before Christmas 2017. By the first week of 2018, she had a straight-to-series deal with CBS, Murphy Brown’s home from 1988 to 1998. Only after conferring with Bergen and original stars Joe Regalbuto (Frank Fontana), Faith Ford (Corky Sherwood), and Grant Shaud (Miles Silverberg) did English agree to reboot the Murphy machine.

When Murphy Brown premiered in November 1988, the country was in the midst of a war “for the soul of America,” as pundit Pat Buchanan once dubbed it. Rallying around the idea of family values, the religious right hammered away at affirmative action, feminism, gay rights, and “indecent” art. Liberals were denounced as members of the “cultural elite” who, as Vice President Dan Quayle later warned, lurked in “newsrooms, sitcom studios, and faculty lounges.”

English steered her sitcom directly into this storm when she decided on a Season Four story line in which Murphy—age 42 and single—gets pregnant and decides to keep her baby. Hoping to shore up the Republican base during the 1992 presidential re-election campaign, Quayle made a speech in the wake of the L.A. riots that linked black welfare mothers to a fictional white privileged woman. Murphy, Quayle claimed, was “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

The story gripped the media: an image of Murphy and her newborn appeared on the front page of The New York Times, and the New York Daily Newsheadlined its cover story QUAYLE TO MURPHY BROWN: YOU TRAMP! Bush lost to Bill Clinton, and Murphy Brown won Emmys for best comedy, best actress, and best direction that year, ending the season as the third-most-watched show in the country.

Faced with a contemporary news environment that makes the Quayle era look quaint, English needed to assemble a team that could bring her characters into the present. As the president of the United States labels the news media “the enemy of the American people” and cozies up to world leaders who murder and imprison journalists, Murphy’s dedication to muckraking will take on new resonance. “We want to educate people about what actual journalists do, and how they really have to verify things,” says English. “People don’t know this, because they believe the president, [who] says, They’re making it all up. Anonymous sources, they don’t exist!”