Earlier this week, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that Roseanne Barr was plotting a return to primetime; she’s working on developing a new sitcom for Fox in which she’d play the matriarch of a family. Sound familiar? Barr is famous for her spot-on portrayal of working-class clan leader Roseanne Connor from the ground-breaking ’80s-’90s sitcom Roseanne, which centered on a hard-up family in the fictional town of Lanford, Illinois.
After hearing this exciting news, I recalled a back-and-forth I’d had with the actress recently. Last fall, for the 20th anniversary of Roseanne, I pulled together an exhaustive oral history of the show. One interesting tidbit that came out of my two-hour sit down with Barr was a comment she made about where the Connor family would be today: “I’ve always said now that if they were on TV, [son] DJ would have been killed in Iraq and [the Connors] would have lost their house,” she told me. When I asked for more details on where the rest of the Connors—Jackie, Becky, Darlene, David, and Mark—would be, Barr clammed up, telling me, “Your question is intellectual property that may be developed later, so I don’t want to get into that.” I pressed a bit further, but she wasn’t having it: “No preview, absolutely not.”
Given that she’s developing another family sitcom—with former Roseanne executive producer Caryn Mandabach, no less—and that she’s thought about where the Connors would be now (a subject she views as “intellectual property”), my question is: Are the Connors coming back to TV? Could Roseanne be plotting a rebirth of the family with her as the grandmotherly matriarch ruling over a brood of fully grown children and young grandchildren?
Armed with all this information, PopWatchers, I ask you: Would you want to see Roseanne Barr launch a reboot of the Connor clan? Would it even make sense, given all the craziness with the final season (Dan dying, Mark with Darlene, Becky with David, etc.)? What do you think all of the characters would be up to today? Would such a working-class comedy fly in today’s wealth-obsessed prime time landscape? Sound off!