CNN TV On the Edge: Moments That Shaped Our Culture

9/8c

Sometimes TV is bigger than just TV. That’s the argument of a provocative four-part series subtitled “Moments That Shaped Our Culture,” reliving flash points that generated headlines well beyond that week’s ratings charts. The opener relives an incident that inspired one of the better jokes at last weekend’s Emmys, when five-time Murphy Brown Emmy winner Candice Bergen recalled the fallout in 1992 from then-Vice President Dan Quayle assailing her character, a high-profile TV anchorwoman, for “mocking the importance of fathers” in an Emmy-winning episode during which she gave birth as a single mother. The ensuing debate over so-called family values lingers today, and in contemporary segments, Bergen chokes up while reading from the original script, while series creator Diane English reflects on “this whole world that, you know, just exploded that I never thought I would be a part of.” Future installments address Ellen DeGeneres coming out in public and as her Ellen TV character in 1997, Oprah Winfrey displaying a wagonful of animal fat in 1988, and Kanye  West dissing then-president George W. Bush during a post-Hurricane Katrina telethon in 2005