Dan’s wedding to Louise almost forced The Conners to address the absence of its former title character, Roseanne and in the process proved that the show still struggles to escape her shadow. Now in its fourth season, The Conners began life way back in 1988 as the sitcom Roseanne. Starring Roseanne Barr as the titular antiheroine, Roseanne was a comical look at working-class family life that ran throughout most of the ‘90s. However, despite her departure, the new incarnation of the show is unable to leave her influence behind.
At the height of its popularity, Roseanne was almost as much of a pop culture phenomenon as Friends, and the sitcom’s supporting cast introduced a slew of future sitcom stars to TV viewers. The Big Bang Theory’s Johnny Galecki cut his teeth on Roseanne alongside future Rick & Morty star Sarah Chalke, and the show enjoyed largely solid reviews for much of its nine-season run. However, Roseanne’s final season was despised by both fans and critics for its zany tone and the bleak finale’s reveal that Roseanne’s beloved husband Dan died in season 8 and subsequent events were all an extended fantasy sequence.
As such, fans were initially thrilled when ABC revived Roseanne with its original cast in 2017 for a tenth season. The revived Roseanne retconned Dan’s death, bringing back John Goodman in the process, and was largely a success with critics and fans. However, racist remarks from star Roseanne Barr led ABC to drop the actor and retool the series to center around the rest of Roseanne’s screen family, the eponymous Conners. Now in its fourth season, The Conners has referenced Roseanne’s offscreen death but has never really come to terms with the former star’s absence. For example, the episode in which her widower Dan married Louise barely mentioned Roseanne at all, other than Dan’s oblique references to marrying his high school sweetheart. For many long-time viewers, ignoring the past of both characters felt unnatural, but the circumstances of Barr’s departure make it tricky for The Conners to pull off light-hearted jokes about her absence.
The decision to have a tornado threaten the ceremony felt like the perfect opportunity for a Roseanne joke, given the anarchic influence Barr’s character was on the rest of the Conners throughout her tenure on the show. The Conners has struggled with Roseanne’s legacy before, and this is not the first family-centric story that felt oddly hollow as the characters struggled not to mention the proverbial elephant in the room. However, with the character’s kids being present at Dan’s wedding and her sister present at the ceremony, it was more jarring than ever before that no one had a tender moment to mourn their mother.
The primary issue for The Conners is that in-universe, Roseanne died tragically, but in real-life, Barr’s racist remarks almost tanked the entire production and jeopardized the future of the series shortly after its successful revival. The Roseanne of the series died of an opioid overdose, the sort of topical tragedy that sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother, Scrubs, and Friends have historically been able to work into their overarching stories. However, the behavior of Roseanne’s former actor makes eulogizing and fondly remembering the fictional character somewhat tasteless, given how recent and offensive Barr’s comments were. As such, as proven by the Dan’s wedding episode, The Conners still struggles with balancing the role that Roseanne the character played in their history and their relationship with the actor Roseanne Barr in real life.
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