After a successful, yet tense rebooted season, it turns out that the one thing Roseanne didn’t need was Roseanne.
No, she did not die in surgery. No, she didn’t run away. Yes, she might still be haunting us. But the clearest thing in The Conners premiere is that Roseanne Conner is dead and she is really, really gone. There’s not even an image of the ’90s matriarch in the reboot’s reboot—and if you’re looking for that signature opening sequence, it’s gone, too. The Conners is a new show, and ABC wants to make that very clear.
To catch you up, Roseanne Conner died of an opioid overdose. After hinting that the family’s matriarch passed after experiencing a heart attack in bed, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) breaks it to Dan (John Goodman) and Darlene (Sara Gilbert) that she actually died from an overdose. The premiere walks a carefully constructed line between humor and gravity, with a daring double-down face-off between Dan and Marcy (guest star Mary Steenburgen), who offered Roseanne her extra painkillers when Roseanne claimed she needed them. The whole thing culminates in Darlene realizing that Roseanne had been stashing pills around the house.
What The Conners felt like was what I’d hoped Roseanne would be all along: a brave, candid, comic look at working-class America and the troubles those who live within it face. Places like Lanford, Illinois—small towns across America—are seeing mothers and brothers and sons and aunts die from opioid overdoses, and their surviving family members are left discussing who to blame and how to make sense of it.
What The Conners felt like was what I’d hoped Roseanne would be all along: a brave, candid, comic look at working-class America.
This premiere episode captured that perfectly in a way that the season from earlier this year just couldn’t seem to do. Everything felt so heavy-handed and forced. But The Conners put away the previous show’s dueling leftist and Trump-supporting agendas and lived in the space it was always supposed to inhabit: an honest, yet still humorous, examination of life outside of the left-leaning cities in which television is created. For the first time since 1997, Roseanne felt like Roseanne—and it was because Roseanne wasn’t a part of it.
In what is maybe the most surprising twist, Becky (Lecy Goranson) emerged as the episode’s comedic MVP. The dark humor behind Roseanne’s stashed pills being the “only thing” Becky wanted is the kind of uncomfortable jab that made the original iteration of the show so revolutionary. In what seems to be Roseanne’s stead is DJ’s wife, Gina (Maya Lynne Robinson), newly home from Afghanistan. She’s the conservative, nuanced Bible-beater that Roseanne seemed to want to create in Roseanne, and the fact that she’s an African-American character is particularly savory.
But more than anything, the opening half-hour of The Conners is the redo that Roseanne so desperately needed. To take off my critical hat and put on the fan one, Roseanne was supposed to be the refreshing middle ground between big-city liberal politics and the disenfranchised rural communities that voted conservatively. It was supposed to address the real pitfalls and triumphs of America in a way that the ’90s classic did. If Roseanne had been able to bottle the thoughtful, forward-thinking star that it had in the ’90s, I would have been on board. But she died. Or at least went somewhere we couldn’t recognize. So for The Conners to get a second life, it’s all-too-poignant that Roseanne Conner was killed off, because the woman who created her doesn’t exist anymore, either.
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The premiere of The Conners fluctuated between poignantly funny and the deeply sad, but in its coming episodes, it feels like the sitcom will be able to reimagine the energy that made Roseanne so groundbreaking when it premiered three decades ago. This first installment was a necessary funeral—an appropriately sad goodbye to a woman who helped capture an authentic American psyche. In her place, the cast she indoctrinated with her thoughtful story will carry on the spirit of that original show.
If Roseanne gave 2018 any gift, it was the reminder that The Conners doesn’t need her anymore. That’s evidenced by the perfectly recreated opening sequence revealed at the end of the episode. The Conners is ready to breathe life into the often-overlooked depths of America in its own way.
