COMMENTARY : When TV Characters Take a Risk, a Fan’s Psyche Takes a Beating

I’m looking for a little support.

Maybe a group of us could get together on alternate Wednesdays or something because, to be honest, I’m having trouble dealing with life’s changes.

Not my own. As always, I can ignore, put off or otherwise refuse to recognize those.

But when there’s a change in one of my favorite returning series--a major but undesirable turn of events, some fundamental change of direction or alteration of character--I can become unglued.

If you can’t find comfort, security and stability in escapist reality, after all, where can you find it?

Take the season-opener of CBS’ “Murphy Brown.” I confess I didn’t spend my entire summer wondering whether Murphy (Candice Bergen) was really pregnant and by whom. But I think I was probably wearing the same expression as Murphy in the closing seconds of last season’s cliffhanger when the unmarried TV anchorwoman pulled out the blue-tipped results of her home pregnancy test.

Why, I wondered, are they getting serious on me? What, I tried to imagine, were the writers--never mind Murphy--going to do with this baby?

I confess that, even as a parent, I view the event less like her live-in house painter, Eldin Bernecky (Robert Pastorelli)--the only person to really congratulate the seemingly unsinkable Ms. Brown--and more like anchorman Jim Dial (Charles Kimbrough), who told the F.Y.I. anchorwoman that this pregnancy is the worst thing to happen to television since Rhoda’s wedding.

My mind was swimming with the unfunny possibilities for one of my favorite sitcoms: Murphy quits F.Y.I. and moves to the Lifetime Network as the new host of “What Every Baby Knows”; in a new twist on “Three’s Company,” Murphy’s right-wing boyfriend Jerry Gold (Jay Thomas) and the left-wing father of her child, Jake Lowenstein (Robin Thomas), move in with Murphy and Eldin to see which would-be father really knows best.

Murphy Brown a mommy? It’s too late, obviously, to write the kid out, but I’m hoping she gets a nanny. What can I say? I prefer Murphy single and unencumbered by anything but her own cranky disposition.

Some changes are easier to confront than others, depending on how closely they mirror one’s own life.

Does it bother me that “Gabriel’s Fire,” last season’s ABC drama starring James Earl Jones, returned this season as “Pros & Cons,” an action-comedy with a new co-star, Richard Crenna?

No. Not at all. Because I never cared about “Gabriel’s Fire,” even though I love Jones.

I’m a little more concerned about the future of NBC’s “L.A. Law” without Harry Hamlin and Jimmy Smits, though it is obvious the show has a lot of--as newcomer Amanda Donohoe says about her character C.J. Lamb’s sexuality--”flexibility.”

Coupled with the depressing menu of mostly icky sitcoms new to this season, the changes in my old favorites are a little hard to take. (Please, CBS, don’t touch “Northern Exposure”!)

The truth is, I still have a lot of anger, pain, etc., from TV traumas of the past.

Do you have any idea what kind of confusion an impressionable young lad experiences when one season Elizabeth Montgomery is married to Dick York on “Bewitched” and the next she’s married to Dick Sargent--and they’re both supposed to be Darrin Stephens?

Maybe we could talk about it at length in the group session.