Plenty has changed in the world since the Connor family initially signed off the air after nine seasons in 1997. Those differences, both social and political, take center stage in ABC’s eight-episode reboot of Roseanne, which picks up the story of the brash Midwestern family more than years later, as daughter Darlene and her children move back in with her aging parents. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the Connor home itself.
Production designer John Shaffner—the man behind the sets of The Big Bang Theory, Mom, and Two and a Half Men—was tasked with creating the sets for the new Roseanne, which was renewed after just one episode: With 18.2 million viewers tuning in to the premiere, it scored TV’s highest Adult 18–49 rating for any comedy telecast on any night in three and a half years. (Ironically, the show it beat was another one Shaffner worked on: CBS’s Big Bang Theory season eight opener).
“When I first met with Roseanne, and executive producers Sara Gilbert, Whitney Cummings, and Bruce Helford, we talked about the fact that Dan was a contractor,” he says. “Perhaps there was some remodeling, some updating.” After all, despite Dan Connor having died of a heart attack at the end of the original series (in perhaps one of the most controversial television series finales to date), John Goodman would be reprising his role as the patriarch of the working-class household. It’s a tactic seen in other reboots, such as Will & Grace and Dallas: When the ending isn’t fitting, pretend it never happened.
Shaffner and his team worked on plans for a refreshed version of the Connor home with new kitchen wallpaper and a few new pieces of furniture. But when they came back to the production team with display boards of ideas, it was clear that the family’s home—unlike Dan Connor’s storyline—would remain firmly in the past. “I saw on their faces a dawning realization that they did not want to change the house,” Shaffner says. “They wanted it to be as close as possible as we could make it to the old set.”
That’s where the challenge began for the production team. First, the plan of the house had to be re-created so they could get the correct proportions. “We looked at around 40 episodes so that we could figure out how to do all the moldings, trim, door and window detailing, and the kitchen cabinets,” Shaffner says. “Then we drew everything as best we could guess, very carefully, to match what had been there.”
Set decorator Anne Ahrens searched for pieces that would match the original decor, which was difficult given that the first iteration of the show debuted 30 years ago. “Certain kinds of carpet, fabric, wall coverings that were available then are simply not available now,” notes Shaffner.
A key part of the process was finding the perfect living room sofa. Shaffner discovered that the original is owned by the Museum of Television in Phoenix, but the show wasn’t able to use it because of the rental cost and stipulations regarding use. Aherns bought two similar sofas on Craigslist, and cut one down to create a chair. The main sofa was covered in fabric purchased from a mobile home manufacturer in Indiana. “Once we got the sofa covered, we aged it carefully,” Shaffner says. “We even went in and painted some of the stripes in the plaid, to match more accurately what we could perceive as the stripes in the original sofa.”
A small piece of vintage wallpaper served as the inspiration for the kitchen wallpaper, which was made in collaboration with Astek Wallcovering. Aherns also found a few original items from the set in prop houses around Los Angeles. Whatever the team couldn’t match exactly, they tried to replicate closely—thinking that if Dan and Roseanne did replace something, they would get something that looked like what they already had. “That kind of helped us over the hump of absolutely matching things,” he says.
But despite their own herculean efforts, Shaffner still gives full credit to the show’s original designer, Garvin Eddy: “We tried our best to honor what he had created in the beginning, and what had grown to become one of America’s favorite living rooms.”
