Vice President Dan Quayle publicly criticized the character for making the decision to parent without having a father in her son’s life.
Fans of the original run of Murphy Brown will remember that Avery was named after her opinionated mother, who had died in the season prior to the character giving birth.
That, in turn, fed a storyline for the comedy where the fictional news program Murphy worked for created a special episode that celebrated the diversity of modern families, which used actual footage of Quayle’s speech.
The birth of the character’s son set off some real-world controversy, seeing as how Murphy was unmarried when she became pregnant and decided to raise the child alone after telling Avery’s father and finding out that he wasn’t interested in being a parent.