The Conners Season 7 Most Impossible Roseanne Return Is The Best Way To End Jackie's Story
While The Conners rarely referenced Roseanne's ending, the spinoff's season 4 Christmas episode featured a shockingly dark joke about the off-screen event. The Conners season 7 will see the spinoff come to an end, but this is far from the first conclusion for the sitcom franchise. The Conners originally began life as Roseanne back in 1988, and the sitcom about a working-class family and their sardonic titular matriarch proved a huge hit until its disastrous final season in 1997. Roseanne season 9 was so hated that it was retconned in 2017's season 10 revival, which fared well with viewers.
Related The Conners' Banned Christmas Episode Makes 1 Roseanne Story Harder To Understand
The Conners season 5's Christmas episode was banned for unrelated reasons, but the missing out makes one piece of Roseanne canon deeply confusing.
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Although a ratings hit, Roseanne's revival was swiftly canceled when star Roseanne Barr was fired over racist tweets. The show was then retooled into The Conners, a series that would focus on Roseanne's grieving family in the aftermath of her off-screen death from an opioid overdose. The Conners' large cast of characters meant the spinoff could effectively continue Roseanne's story without Roseanne. Dropping a show's title character is a tricky achievement for any series, and since Roseanne made TV history throughout the '90s, this was particularly difficult for The Conners. The spinoff took an unusual approach to this issue.
The Conners Season 4's Christmas Episode Mocked Roseanne's Death Dan's Mattress Was Glibly Discussed By His Children Close
In The Conners season 1, the series was morbidly obsessed with Roseanne's death. The premiere followed the family's real-time reactions to the tragedy, making The Conners arguably the most notably bleak and brutal network sitcom pilot of all time. However, as the spinoff continued and began to gain an identity of its own, the show quickly tried to forget about its former title character. If season 1 was oddly obsessed with re-litigating the circumstances of Roseanne's death, season 3 was more interested in pretending that the Conner family never had another member. This became a problem in season 4.
"Yard Sale, Phone Fail, And a College Betrayal," featured a wildly dark joke that mocked Roseanne's death.
Although The Conners' first Christmas episode saw Jackie accuse Louise of trying to replace her sister when she began dating Dan in season 2, this understandable fear was soon swept under the rug for good. By the time the pair married in season 4, no one even mentioned Roseanne at Louise and Dan's wedding, despite Jackie officiating the event. To make matters weirder, the following Christmas outing, episode 8, "Yard Sale, Phone Fail, And a College Betrayal," featured a wildly dark joke that mocked Roseanne's death. When Dan worried about getting rid of his furniture, his children intervened.
The Conners Season 4 Struggled With Roseanne's Legacy Roseanne's Spinoff Jumped Between Silence and Tasteless Gags Close
Becky, Darlene, and DJ played rock paper scissors to get the mattress that they "Were conceived on and Roseanne died on," and the glib brutality of this line shows just how much the spinoff struggled to get the right tone when mentioning its former heroine. Dan and Louise's wedding didn't even involve any mention of Roseanne, but her kids were mocking her death only a few weeks later while discussing whether to throw out her belongings. Although The Conners' Thanksgiving episode saw Jackie and Darlene address Roseanne's impact on their relationship, the spinoff rarely got this balance right.
The Conners Cast Member
Character
John Goodman
Dan Conner
Laurie Metcalf
Jackie Harris-Goldufski
Sara Gilbert
Darlene Conner-Olinsky
Lecy Goranson
Becky Conner-Healy
Katey Sagal
Louise Conner
Emma Kenney
Harris Conner-Healy
Ames McNamara
Mark Conner-Healy
The Conners mentioning Roseanne often felt too sentimental or way too harsh, as evidenced by her children not even flinching at the prospect of sleeping on the mattress she died on. The characters either treated Roseanne as a sainted figure, which didn't align at all with her spiky, abrasive personality during her life, or talked about her as if her death was a joke to them. While "Yard Sale, Phone Fail, And a College Betrayal," had its moments, the issue holding the episode back from being a classic festive outing of The Conners is exactly this tonal inconsistency in its Roseanne references.
The Conners Season 4's Christmas Episode's Best Roseanne Gag Still Worked Darlene Implied Her Mother Was In Hell Close
Fortunately, The Conners season 4's Christmas episode did feature one perfect joke about Roseanne. When the family eventually decided that they would burn their furniture, Dan noted that it would end up in "Heaven." This prompted Becky to add that if that smoke went down to Hell, then Roseanne would at last have her furniture back. As controversial as The Conners season 4's "Roseanne in Hell" gag was, this dark punchline was fitting given the show's sardonic sense of humor. The Conners was always bracingly unsentimental in its depiction of dysfunctional families, as was the original Roseanne.
Roseanne's often unsparing sense of humor allowed family sitcoms to transition from the idealized, saccharine stories of Full House and The Cosby Show to something edgier and more imperfect. Alongside Married... With Children, Roseanne paved the way for shows like Malcolm in the Middle and The Simpsons to deconstruct schmaltzy family sitcom tropes throughout the '90s and '00s. As such, Becky declaring that Roseanne was in Hell was a perfect way to prove that she inherited her mother's sharp tongue, whereas the kids joking about her overdose just seemed uncharacteristically callous and jarring in an earlier scene from the same episode.
Dan's Christmas Story Never Made Sense For The Conners Season 4 The Conners Burning Their Furniture Beggared Belief Close
While The Conners season 4's Christmas episode got a good gag out of the twist, Dan burning the old furniture he shared with Roseanne never felt believable. Famously, the Conners are a working-class family living paycheck to paycheck. As such, there was no way that the spendthrift Dan would burn an entire suite of furniture that he could sell, solely so that he felt like he was making a fresh start with Louise. While the ending of The Conners is likely to be more upbeat than this bittersweet episode, the six-episode "Farewell event" should learn from it.
The characters of The Conners shouldn't lose empathy for each other.
The Conners is at its best when, like its predecessor Roseanne, the show is exploring the realities of working-class life in America. This inevitably means encountering issues like addiction, overdose, poverty, discrimination, unemployment, and unplanned pregnancy, and the show's status as a sitcom means the heroes are likely to mock these serious issues. However, the characters of The Conners shouldn't lose empathy for each other. Treating the events of Roseanne's ending as a joke led to The Conners season 4's Christmas joke feeling oddly bleak and impersonal, depriving the sitcom of its usual family focus.
According to TVLine, The Conners season 7's "Six-episode farewell event" will air in March 2025.
Source: TVLine
Your Rating close 10 stars 9 stars 8 stars 7 stars 6 stars 5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star Rate Now 0/10 Leave a Review 27 8/10 The Conners TV-PG ComedyDrama
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*Availability in US Release Date October 16, 2018 Network ABC Cast John Goodman , Sara Gilbert , Macaulay Callard , Laurie Metcalf , Lecy Goranson , Michael Fishman , Emma Kenney , Ames McNamara , Jayden Rey , Maya Lynne Robinson , Jay R. Ferguson Writers Dave Caplan , Bruce Helford , Matt Williams Streaming Service(s) Hulu
