Five interlocking conflicts that add up to one big argument about the sitcom’s new season.
Sara Gilbert, Roseanne Barr, John Goodman
Emily St. James
Emily St. James was a senior correspondent for Vox, covering American identities. Before she joined Vox in 2014, she was the first TV editor of the A.V. Club.
For the near decade her show was on the air, Roseanne Barr seemed to not just court controversy but crave it.
After Roseanne became a hit, shortly after its debut in 1988, Barr took over for Matt Williams, the man credited as sole creator of a show obviously and heavily based on Barr’s standup (an original sin by Hollywood that Barr has never entirely forgiven the industry for), and routinely purged the show’s writing staff. Every behind-the-scenes story about Roseanne — even the ones Barr tells — is filled with fraught creative moments, with conflict, with headache and heartache.
But it didn’t stop there. She performed the national anthem somewhat irreverently and created a national dialogue about respect for the flag (a completely ridiculous one but one that, nonetheless, existed). She married Tom Arnold, a writer on the show, and became an endless fount of tabloid fascination. Every little thing she did became a national news story, until Roseanne inevitably began to soften in the ratings, and America moved on.
But through it all, the series itself was the foremost argument for Barr as a creative force to be reckoned with. While it was not the White Working-Class Sitcom — the show belongs to a tradition stretching back to The Honeymooners and, even before that, radio comedy — it was one of the few on the air in its era, and one of the last to thrive before TV comedy got taken over by upper-class white folks who never seemed to worry about money. Roseanne was tough and honest and occasionally incendiary, and it could pivot from very, very funny to very, very heartbreaking on a dime.
So it should come as no surprise that the new Roseanne — technically a continuation of the original series, but also a different show in some subtle ways — would reignite this old debate between where Roseanne the actress endedand Roseanne the character began. Except, because this is 2018 and everything eventually turns into a discussion about Donald Trump, the political polarity has been completely flipped. The arguments now are less about Roseanne’s bold examinations of feminism and class both on and offscreen and more about how she’s perhaps the president’s most famous supporter.
And how its escalated the US-China cold war.
These arguments have become a vast, interlocking set of controversies that are impossible to separate, because each is necessary to understand the other. For instance, writing off Roseanne entirely — because it homogenizes Trump supporters as people just worried about their families or the country — misses the ways the series depicts Roseanne as a hectoring bully who convinced her sister, Jackie, not to vote for Hillary Clinton at the last minute. (She voted for Jill Stein instead.) But praising Roseanne as a series about the self-delusions of Trump supporters misses the ways it refuses to talk about the harsh realities of living in Trump’s America for people who aren’t straight and white.
As with all uneasy meetings of art and politics, this is more complicated than we might like it to be because good art examines complication. But does Roseanne? Let’s unpack that question into five interlocking conflicts.
Conflict 1: Roseanne Barr vs. Roseanne Conner
Roseanne
Roseanne emerges. ABC
Sooner or later, every argument about Roseanne returns to this central point: How readily can you separate the real Roseanne from the character she plays on TV? And how much should you be asked to?
In a weird way, it’s a question that runs parallel to debates over great films or TV shows made by the many men accused of sexual misconduct. Separating art from artist, of course, is something that is going to vary from viewer to viewer. But what makes Roseanne even more complicated than, say, a terrific movie produced by Harvey Weinstein is just how much the character of Roseanne Conner is based on the former life circumstances of the real Roseanne Barr. The two have always been seen as the same, in the way that, say, Lena Dunham has routinely been conflated with Hannah Horvath, her character from Girls, but the two Roseannes have in fact been different in some crucial ways.
In the case of Roseanne (2018), it’s easy to imagine a version of the show that exists in a world where viewers had no idea Roseanne Barr was a die-hard Trump supporter because the actress had never talked about him on social media. And in that world, it would be easier to swallow thi
s exact version of the series for those who believe support for Trump is a moral wrong because there would be more distance between the fictional Roseanne who supports Trump and the real one, whose politics we wouldn’t know.
But, of course, we don’t live in that world. We know not just that Barr is a Trump supporter but that she’s one who readily and easily adheres to over-the-top right-wing conspiracy-mongering; who considers going on the Fox News program Hannity, which has become a sort of clearinghouse for those very conspiracies; who mocks Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors on Twitter.
Even if you take Barr at her word that she thought Trump should be president because he would shake up Washington — and sure, I’m inclined to — that defense overlooks the fact that an incredibly rich woman who never needs to work another day in her life unless she wants to would be relatively unaffected by the shake-up Trump was promising.
Barr has repeatedly avowed that she doesn’t believe Trump is a racist, that this is a picture the media has painted of him that is unfair. Sure, he might say some things that are uncouth, but don’t you want a president who isn’t afraid to say what he’s really thinking?
From the earliest days of her standup career, this is how Barr has seen herself, so it’s not hard to see how she would feel that connection to Trump. (It’s in some ways similar to other comedians of Barr’s generation who have complained about comedy becoming too “politically correct,” as old fallbacks of ’80s and ’90s standup that pivoted on supposedly inviolable aspects of race and gender are now routinely questioned as the basis for jokes.)
It is not unrealistic to believe that Roseanne Conner — mired in economic instability and longing for some sort of shake-up — might vote for Trump. Plenty of other white people in that situation did just that. And though the fictional Roseanne is a warmer figure than social media Roseanne, she’s still possessed of a kind of free-floating anger that the new series doesn’t always interrogate but also isn’t afraid to depict.
The new show is about having to deal with someone who holds these beliefs (in ways I’ll deal with momentarily), when you’re maybe just trying to live your life. You might still love your mom or sister, even if she believes some kooky things. What’s your responsibility to disabuse her of those ideas?
It remains to be seen if this new Roseanne will challenge its title character on these beliefs, but the original series, produced at a time when Barr had far more cultural cachet and power, wasn’t afraid to do so. So it’s not completely unrealistic to assume that these sorts of challenges might arise.
On the other hand, the real question here revolves around art’s moral responsibility, if it even has that responsibility, and how synonymous Trump supporters are with the president himself. I promise we’ll get there. But first, we have to take a couple of detours, starting with the elephant in the room.
