While The Conners season 7’s ending wasn’t terrible, the Roseanne spinoff did profoundly fail one of the original show’s heroes and its best replacement for the late eponymous heroine. When Roseanne became The Conners, the sitcom’s entire DNA had to shift pretty radically almost overnight. The series had already been through more overhauls than most, thanks to the messy end of its original run and its 2017 revival. Roseanne began life as a grounded sitcom about a working-class family, centered primarily on the perspective of their titular sardonic mother, Roseanne.
As the large cast of The Conners proves, the show’s ambition grew from here. Later seasons of Roseanne turned Mark and David, the love interests of the family’s two daughters, Becky and Darlene, into main characters themselves. Roseanne’s final season largely dropped the family and focused mainly on Roseanne after the Conners won the lottery and became multi-millionaires. This disastrous outing was so poorly received that season 9’s finale retconned everything, revealing the family never really won the lottery and Roseanne’s husband Dan had secretly died of a heart attack a season earlier.
Darlene’s Season 7 Arc Ignored Her Roseanne Dream Entirely
Darlene Wanted To Be A Writer In The Original Show and the Revival
Compared to The Conners series finale, the ending of Roseanne season 9 was a complete mess. The historically unpopular twist only became more ridiculous when 2017’s Roseanne revival retconned this ending, revealing that Dan was still alive and well and season 9’s story was merely the plot of an unpublished novel Roseanne wrote. Roseanne then remained the show’s heroine, even with its expanding cast, throughout the season 10 revival until real-life actor Roseanne Barr’s racist Twitter tirade resulted in her firing. However, this didn’t always mean she was the show’s true focus.
By the time Barr was fired, Roseanne’s potential replacement was already starting to emerge organically from the revival. As noted in a 2018 VanityFair article, Roseanne’s daughter Darlene had inherited her mother’s dreams of becoming a writer and her thwarted existence as an underemployed creative and working mother. Darlene emerged as the heart of the series after Roseanne’s death thanks to her struggles to parent Harris and Mark while also paying to keep a roof over their heads. Her string of unreliable, underpaid jobs proved equally harrowing and hilarious.
Like Roseanne, Darlene was a spiky, sarcastic presence who could make even a hopeless storyline funny thanks to her attitude. Thus, The Conners season 7’s pointless Darlene arc was perhaps the show’s greatest betrayal of its predecessor. Darlene was relegated to the sidelines at the worst time as the show wrapped up with a maudlin plot centered on Roseanne’s memory. Instead of celebrating Darlene’s next step, The Conners season 7 cast its real heroine aside to reminisce on the good old days of its long-gone matriarch.
The Conners Sidelined Roseanne’s Best Replacement At the Worst Possible Time
Darlene Became The Main Character of The Conners In Earlier Seasons
Before season 7 began, Darlene seemed to be in a prime position to finally give professional writing a try. When a fire burned down his family’s hardware store and provided him with a massive insurance payout, Ben bought a magazine as he felt this was a sign to pursue his writing ambitions again. At the same time, Darlene was trapped in a dead-end job as a university cafeteria worker. She resented the role, but it provided her son Mark with a free ride at university.
While Becky getting a happy ending in season 7 was also important, Darlene’s positive payoff seemed like a done deal. Her loving husband had just bought a magazine and needed new people to work there while, at the same time, Mark announced he was leaving his current university so he could work for a year, save up, and attend the University of Chicago instead. Ben and Darlene collaborating on relaunching the magazine was such an obviously perfect opportunity that the plot seemed almost too predictable. Sadly, that wasn’t its problem.
The Conners Season 7’s Shift in Focus Let Darlene
The aimless Chad storyline just drew attention to the lack of focus on Darlene’s career plans, as she was seemingly suddenly content to work as a cafeteria manager provided Ben didn’t spend too long at the office after hours. While Dan’s emotional goodbye in The Conners season 7 was fitting, this subplot was a profound misreading of Darlene’s character arc throughout Roseanne’s original run, its revival, and The Conners. If there was one thing Darlene’s relationship with David taught her, it was not to waste her potential by waiting on a partner to live her life for her.
