Roseanne’s 35th anniversary makes this the perfect time to look back on the family sitcom, but The Conners predecessor had some uncomfortable issues.

While Roseanne might have lasted for 10 seasons and spawned a spinoff in the form of The Conners, re-watching the family sitcom 35 years after its debut uncovers some uncomfortable truths. Roseanne was a huge hit when the series began in 1988. The family sitcom followed the Conners, a blue-collar clan eking out an existence in the town of Lanford. While the Conners lived from paycheck to paycheck, their lovable, feisty matriarch Roseanne (played by Roseanne Barr) ensured that the family was always able to get by.

When Roseanne was revived for a tenth season in 2017, Barr and the rest of the show’s impressive ensemble cast returned. The reboot was a hit, but Barr was fired shortly after the finale aired due to her racist tweets. Roseanne then became a now six-season spinoff titled The Conners, which kept the same cast and picked up after Roseanne’s offscreen death. While Barr’s public meltdown was a surprise, the seeds of Roseanne’s eventual destruction were sown decades earlier. The show’s 35th anniversary just arrived, so there is no better time to look back on Roseanne’s legacy even if this does uncover some discomfiting truths about the series.

The cast of The Conners carried on the story of Roseanne without Roseanne, and the characters both old and new shined in the spinoff.
10
Roseanne’s Tone Was Always Strange
Split image of Roseanne in a Christmas sweater beside a mall Santa
Roseanne was known for its working-class milieu. In an era when many of the most prominent sitcom families on television lived in lavish wealth, the Conners were a distinctly realistic alternative. However, like the similarly grounded Malcolm in the Middle, Roseanne had a lot of surreal flights of fancy that are often forgotten by retrospective reviews. While Roseanne season 9 is infamous for its bizarre moments, the show always featured cartoony fantasy segues and dream sequences from time to time. Though never as outright absurd as Married… With Children, the sitcom also wasn’t as grounded as later seasons of The Conners.

9
Roseanne’s Revival Betrayed Her Character
Darlene and Roseanne in the season 10 revival
While Roseanne’s revival was met with stellar reviews, this is likely because critics didn’t realize just how much the reboot’s version of Roseanne betrayed the original character. Barr’s acerbic heroine went from a caring mother who tearfully apologized to her child for hitting him to a hooting grandmother who delighted in shoving her granddaughter into a sink during an argument over dishes. In the show’s desperate attempts to pander to viewers with stereotypes about spoiled, overly sensitive Gen Z children, Roseanne’s revival made Roseanne a caricature of her old self.

8
Roseanne Season 9 Is As Terrible As Critics Said
Roseanne and Dan in Roseanne season 10 promo
The final season of Roseanne was a disastrous attempt to turn the series into a bizarre meta-sitcom as the Conners won the lottery and went on a string of absurd misadventures. Roseanne’s husband cheated on her, she saved the First Lady from terrorists, she met the stars of Absolutely Fabulous in a terrible TV crossover that was also somehow a parody of the classic horror movie Rosemary’s Baby, and the finale revealed that none of this had even happened in the show’s reality. While The Conners has its flaws, this misjudged outing was comfortably the worst of the show’s seasons.

7

Roseanne Needed Its Heroine
Split image of Harris in The Conners and Dan and Roseanne in Roseanne
Barr was fired for good reason but, in its early seasons, she really was the original show’s star. In its original incarnation, Roseanne relied on Barr’s chemistry with John Goodman and her rapport with Laurie Metcalf to a fault. Outside these seasoned performers, the cast was uneven and the storylines were largely uninspired. Later seasons gave supporting stars like Estelle Parsons and Martin Mull bigger roles but, when it began, Roseanne truly needed its eponymous heroine for the show’s premise to work.

6 Reasons Dropping Roseanne Barr Saved The Conners
Although killing off the Roseanne character seemed like a death sentence for the show at the time, The Conners saved itself by dropping Roseanne Barr.
6
The Conners Was Better For Roseanne Than Season 11
Roseanne and Darlene in The Conners
In retrospect, the sitcom spinoff The Conners feels more like the old Roseanne than the original revival did. After its pilot killed off Roseanne, The Conners pivoted to focusing on storylines centering on Becky’s alcoholism, the family’s finances, and Darlene’s struggles at work. While these might seem like downbeat topics, they are exactly the realistic problems that Roseanne was great at highlighting. In contrast, Roseanne’s season 10 revival was too busy cramming in hot-button topical storylines to focus on these relatable, univers

al themes.

5
Jackie’s Storyline Was Too Dark

Aunt Jackie frowns in The Conners season 5
Throughout Roseanne’s 10 seasons, Jackie went through countless failed jobs and relationships and her eventual marriage ended in a divorce. Even the very existence of Jackie’s son Andy was retconned by Roseanne’s season 10 revival, confirming that her story was the bleakest in the series by far. Luckily, her relationship with Neville in The Conners improved her prospects a lot.

4
The Conners Wasted Roseanne’s Best Supporting Star
Roseanne’s Leon Carp on his wedding day beside a closeup of Martin Mull
Martin Mull’s Leon Carp was a rare gay character from a ‘90s sitcom whose entire persona wasn’t defined by stereotypes associated with his orientation. Instead, the LGBTQIA+ Roseanne supporting character had a personality, some interesting quirks of his own, and even a few outright villainous moments. This made it all the more surprising and inexplicable that The Conners never revisited this character, who hasn’t appeared in the spinoff so far, despite the fact that Leon’s The Conners return could solve some of the sitcom’s long-held mysteries.

3
Roseanne’s Mother Was Too Awful
Laurie Metcalf’s Jackie and Estelle Parsons’ Bev hug in The Conners Season 5 Episode 13
Bev’s mean-spirited cattiness was funny at first, but, as the series continued, she became an outright abusive mother to the show’s heroines Roseanne and Jackie. Roseanne’s tone initially managed to make this work, Bev’s cruelty in later seasons just seemed unnecessary and gratuitous. The Conners improved this problem by revealing the extent to which Bev sheltered her children from their abusive father, but, without this context, Bev seemed too callous to be a funny supporting character.

2
DJ Never Had A Major Role Even Before The Conners
Roseanne’s DJ in The Conners
While The Conners season 5 caught some criticism for dropping the character, Roseanne’s son DJ never had as big a role in the show as his sisters Darlene and Becky. While Roseanne’s daughter Darlene was the show’s breakout character, Becky was still the source of the show’s biggest teen drama storylines. In contrast, DJ didn’t really serve a purpose in most episodes since he was too young to get into misadventures of his own but too old to be a cute child who tagged along with the rest of the gang.

1
Roseanne’s Optimism Was Misplaced
Roseanne Barr and the Conners cast
The later seasons of Roseanne saw the characters frequently talk about how Darlene and Becky would have many more prospects than their parents. These episodes are now hard to watch as optimistic characters from the ‘90s discuss the fact that the pair will no doubt have an easier life filled with better prospects. Fast-forward to the revival, and Roseanne’s children are just as economically deprived as their parents, but even less stable. While The Conners season 6 might finally give them a happy ending, the heroes of Roseanne ended up in a dark place by the time the spinoff began, thanks to continued economic decline.