It`s a balmy evening in Burbank, Calif., well after rush hour, but the lights in producer Diane English`s office on the Warner Bros. studio lot are ablaze.
So is English, creator and executive producer of ”Murphy Brown.” By every measurement, she`s one of prime-time television`s red-hot commodities. Riding the crest of ”Murphy Brown”`s top-10 status, she`s about to turn her creative ship into a new channel. She will relinquish her connection with
”Murphy Brown,” keeping only the title of creator. With her husband and partner, Joel Shukovsky, technical and business genius of the team, she`s beginning work on the first of four new series CBS is awaiting from them. English will be creator and executive producer on the new shows, as well as writer of some episodes.
The forthcoming Shukovsky-English series, now being cast, is a romantic comedy about a controversial investigative reporter and a recently divorced restaurateur. Audiences will follow them from the day they meet, observing the flow of their relationship. English predicts it will be ”much more about little details in people`s lives-yet just as funny, hopefully, as `Murphy Brown,` with that hard-edged, fast-paced, multiple-camera film style to it.” Working title of the new show is ”Love is Hell.” Cast as the male lead is Jay Thomas, who plays Murphy Brown`s abrasive sometime-boyfriend, Jerry Gold. The woman has yet to be cast.
There is something of a Katharine Hepburn film heroine about English, 43. She`s tall, sleek, witty and articulate, with an easy, engaging laugh. Stylishly garbed in Armani or Chanel, she cuts a figure as arresting as that of her sitcom heroine.
Behind the elegance and elan are the tough times she has overcome.
”The definition of a comedy writer is somebody who did not have a pleasant childhood,” she says, ”and I can definitely put myself in that category.
”There was a lot of strain in our family,” she says evenly. ”My father, an electrical engineer, was an alcoholic. My brother and I did not grow up in an environment that we would consider secure-financially, emotionally, you name it.” But the family stuck it out.
”In those days, that`s what people did-they did it for the children. And once my mother felt my brother and I were old enough, in our late teens, she finally said, `I`ve got another life to live,` and left.”
English had grown up on books and writing and ”Your Show of Shows,” the Sid Caesar-Imogene Coca early TV classic comedy program, which opened the world of sketch comedy to her. She yearned to be a playwright, but detoured into education at Buffalo (N.Y). State Teachers College, and taught a year in an inner-city high school in Buffalo, her home town, before bailing out. Recognizing her literary talent, her theater professor, Warren Enters, urged her to go to New York and take a stab at what she had longed for.
”I had been a sheltered kid. I grew up on a block that nobody left. If the moving van ever came to my block, people came out like it was a spaceship.”
In New York, she says, ”I spent a couple of years just becoming a grownup. I met my husband-we fell in love. He was doing graphics, on-the-air advertising. I was words and he was pictures, and we found that we took the same train Uptown.
”Whenever he took me out to dinner, I`d always take home a doggie bag. It`s funny-today I can afford to have anything I want.”
To make ends meet while trying her hand at writing plays, she got a low-paying job with public television just as it was blossoming. It opened the world of videotape and film to her, and led to her first television scripting assignment.
In the late `70s, after leaving public television, she free-lanced, writing a television column for Vogue magazine and speculative screenplays. Her husband, whom she had married in 1977, was head of a successful ad agency. By 1980, with her first writing credit in the bag for a PBS adaptation of Ursula LeGuin`s ”The Lathe of Heaven,” she and her husband moved to Los Angeles to collaborate in television.
English and Shukovsky are methodical. They carefully mapped their careers the way they might lay out a history for one of their characters.
”We knew the first thing that would have to happen was for me to get a reputation as a writer out here,” she says.
She wrote nine TV movie scripts-three of which were produced. Those led to an offer from CBS to create a half-hour series, ”Foley Square,” which lasted less than a season. Fortuitously, its departure coincided with an opening for executive producer of a new Pam Dawber sitcom, ”My Sister Sam.” It was English`s first exposure to running a television show-and it proved a ringing success.
As English wrote and produced, Shukovsky was researching the business. She was the breadwinner. ”It`s paying off in spades now,” she says, beaming, ”because he`s a brilliant businessman. He learned everything about every deal you could make, and took people to lunch, and became a total expert on all the things I didn`t want to know anything about. It was tough for him-I was living a very different life, with deadlines and late-night rewrites. He was really just kind of waiting until the time was right.”
The time came in 1988. The pitch to CBS was a strike.
”The whole arena of broadcast journalism was beginning to capture the public attention in a way that it never had, and becoming increasingly important,” English says. ”We were becoming much more of a global village. And George Bush was just elected when we went on the air. Within two weeks, we were in the midst of an ever-growing conservative movement in our country. We were clearly an unapologetic Democratic liberal program.
”We always have believed that those people were out there, and they certainly tuned in in force, and kind of clung to us in a way. Also, women had gone through a long period of sometimes difficult and painful evolution and revolution. We`re just kind of beginning to settle in to what this new woman might be.
”I went through this process of changing and growing, and along came this character who really captured the hearts and minds of women across this country.”
Now Murphy is expecting.
”This is a character who`s never let anyone into her life,” English says. ”She has no consistent relationships in her life other than her co-workers. She can`t even keep a plant. There`s something kind of
discomforting, and maybe even a little sad, about somebody who goes into the second half of her life without anybody but herself.
”We had long talks about how we could preserve her independence, how we could preserve her edge and her feistiness, and still give her the challenge of being a mother. We liked the comic possibilities of someone who`s the female version of W.C. Fields raising a child,” English says.
Within the industry, English has a reputation for toughness. Does she believe her personality has changed over the years?
”I don`t know if it`s a function of being in this business, or having 120 people working for you, or the killing pressure of doing this-the high stakes-but I`m not that stars-in-her-eyes naive kid who came from Buffalo 20 years ago,” English says. ”I have a lot more edges to me. That`s why I wrote `Murphy.` I thought I was becoming that, and that it would be interesting to write a woman who was turning 40, and wondering what you do for an encore- where you find your joy in life.
”I really love what I do. That has never gone away,” English says.
”The infatuation with all of this is very much there. But I`m much more realistic about life, and maybe not such a dreamer anymore. And I just think maybe I`ve gotten tougher in a way that sometimes isn`t so good. And I stick up for myself a lot more-I say what`s on my mind.”
But with audiences, awards, and the advent of new ventures, she does acknowledge the toll that has come with the goal.
”What can I say? I have tons of money. I have a lot of clout. In order to get it I have sacrificed a lot of personal time,” English says. ”There definitely was a degree of strain in relationships with my family, who I suddenly forgot to call on holidays and birthdays. And when you`re married and working together, you do see each other every day at work and that`s great, but you have to learn how to leave the work there. I can`t remember any time recently when I`ve sat around and said, `OK, I`ve got nothing to do”`
One of English`s passions is dressing for success. It comes, she says,
”from a lifetime of buying shoes off a bargain table that were stuck together with string.” She also recalls attending a parochial high school with an affluent student body: ”I would look at their cable-knit sweaters and angora and cashmere, and I didn`t have it.”
With Murphy about to give birth (the season finale), what are English`s feelings about the subject in her own life?
”I don`t know if it`s in the cards. I don`t wake up in the morning and think, `Oh, my God, there`s something I really, really want a lot.` I do know that the gates are closing. I`m 43. I don`t feel a lot of pressure to make this decision. I always say, I`ll watch Murphy-I`ll see how she does!”
