‘Murphy Brown’ Welcomes Hillary Clinton as Secret Special Guest

The first episode of CBS’ Murphy Brown revival included a special guest star: Hillary Clinton.

Clinton showed up as Murphy’s new secretary. At the end of her scene, she gave Murphy her business card, which had “hillary@youcouldahadme.com” as her email address.

When Murphy asked Clinton if she had any previous secretarial experience, Clinton replied, “For four years I was a secretary… I was a secretary of a very large organization.”

“I do have some experience with emails,” Clinton later said.

“How are you with team work? You know, putting on a news operation is a huge operation,” Murphy said.

“Oh, I get that completely. Everyone works together. It takes a village,” Clinton added, referring to her book.

Murphy told Clinton she was a little over qualified, and would get back to her soon. Clinton then handed over her business card, and went down the elevator.

Over the summer, Murphy Brown creator Diane English teased a “top secret celebrity guest” and appeared to hint the person would be a real-life public figure playing themselves.

“We have an enormously famous person in our first episode,” English told reporters at the Television Critics Association Press Tour Panel in August.

Murphy Brown‘s 11th season comes 20 years after the series ended in 1998. This time, Murphy (Candice Bergen) is returning from retirement to host a new cable show, with Corky Sherwood (Faith Ford), Frank Fontana (Joe Retgalbuto) and Miles Silverberg (Grant Schaud) all returning to help. Murphy’s son Avery (Jame McDorman) is hosting a show on the rival Wolf News, the show’s stand-in for Fox News.

The new episodes are unabashedly political. Murphy is even inspired to come out of retirement after seeing President Donald Trump win the November 2016 election.

“We’re staying on point with issues. I mean, there really are a lot of issues going on that were going on then and they’re still going on,” Ford told CBS News earlier this week. “And we’re still dealing with them every week and that’s predominantly what our show’s about.”

Bergen also told CBS News that if Hillary Clinton won, there would be no need to revive Murphy Brown.

“If the election had gone another way, if Hillary had been elected, there would have been no discussion about the show coming back, because in our mind, life would have been good, but then we talked — [show creator] Diane [English] once said to CBS when Sarah Palin was running with McCain, she said I just need six episodes,” Bergen said. “Then that petered out, but it was completely driven by the wealth of material that’s being spewn out of the White House every day.”

New episodes of Murphy Brown air on CBS Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. ET. The new season will run 13 episodes.

Photo credit: CBS