The ABC sitcom The Conners was renewed on May 2 for Season 7, which the network has announced will be the show’s last.
That final season, which will wrap the series up with an abbreviated order of six episodes, will bring to a close a saga that began in 1988.
We first met the Conners that year on the first season of Roseanne, a long-running series on ABC that ran until 1997.
The series was created by the famous comedian Roseanne Barr, who also starred as a character named Roseanne.
More than 20 years later, Roseanne was revived, with the majority of the original cast, once again on ABC. The revival was a big ratings success that led to its immediate renewal for a second season.
But the original version of the revival was short-lived, as ABC canceled the series in 2018 after Roseanne made a racist social media about Valerie Jarrett, a longtime adviser to former President Barack Obama.
Later that month, ABC announced it was proceeding with a new spinoff series called The Conners, which would continue the family’s stories, minus the actual and fictitious Roseanne.
When the series returned that fall, it was revealed that Roseanne’s character had died of an opioid overdose. Barr refused to watch the new show.
So, there have been two different shows featuring the Conners. But really, there have been more than that.
One, two, many TV shows
Throughout its run, the original version of Roseanne had frequent behind-the-scenes turmoil, with collaborators of Barr entering and exiting, including her then-husband, Tom Arnold.
Roseanne’s final season had a significant twist: the family won the lottery and became wealthy. In the series finale, however, Roseanne revealed that the entire lottery plotline represented her novel, written after the death of Dan (John Goodman.)
However, when the series returned for the revival, the lottery win and the retconning were retconned, with Dan still alive.
Plus, the Roseanne revival left out such late-series developments as the birth of another Conner child, named for Jerry Garcia, as well as the marriage of Jackie (Laurie Metcalf.)
Much like the Norman Lear-produced sitcoms of the 1970s, Roseanne frequently engaged with hot-button social issues at a time when its competitors, like Seinfeld and Cheers, did not.
Unlike most sitcom characters at the time, the Conners were and are a working-class family.
The set of their house — used in both Roseanne and The Conners — looked believably like the home of a working-class family, and the show’s plots often dealt with their financial precarity.
Roseanne Barr, in the 1980s, was an outspoken supporter of gay rights and pushed to include gay characters on the show at a time when doing just that was considered controversial.
The political salience would continue when the show came back in 2018.
Hillary/Jackie vs. Trump/Roseanne
By the time Roseanne was revived, Barr’s politics had moved firmly to the right, and she was a vocal supporter of Donald Trump. This was also the case with her on-screen alter ego.
So The Conners series premiere had the Trump-backing Roseanne fighting about politics with her sister Jackie, a staunch backer of Hillary Clinton who sported one of the pink hats associated with the Women’s March.
This was widely seen as mirroring the types of fights about Trump that were going on in families across the country at the time and as part of the show’s appeal.
The Conners get political, too.
Once Roseanne departed and the show morphed into The Conners, Trump’s name was invoked less often. However, the show still frequently dealt with topical issues.
The family’s economic struggles continued, with Dan competing for construction work with “illegals” and Becky (Lecy Goranson) having a child with a man who was an undocumented immigrant.
The character of Mark (Ames McNamara), the son of Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and grandson of Roseanne and Dan, is gay, sometimes wears women’s clothes, and struggles at times to fit in.
Does The Conners matter as much as Roseanne?
The Conners exists in a very different era from the original Roseanne, where audiences are much more fragmented, and network television matters much less than it once did.
While it was certainly popular enough to sustain a seven-season run on ABC, The Conners has not entirely captured the zeitgeist the way Roseanne did in the 1980s or even the Roseanne revival did upon its arrival.
Whether it will last for decades in reruns, the way Roseanne has is unclear.
So, where does Roseanne rank?
Compared to other great sitcoms throughout history, the challenge when ranking shows like Roseanne and The Conners is that it was so different in its aims than most other shows.
Roseanne, in its original incarnation, was often funny. But not many people could call it one of the funniest shows ever, and most of its most memorable moments were dramatic rather than comedic.
I would not place Roseanne ahead of Seinfeld, Cheers, The Office, Parks & Recreation, Curb Your Enthusiasm, or the various notable Norman Lear shows. It likely goes somewhere in the 10th-to-20th range of all-time sitcoms.
There’s little doubt that it was one of the most significant sitcoms in the medium’s history, even if it wasn’t always the funniest.
Rolling Stone, in its ranking of the top 100 sitcoms, placed it 19th, probably slightly too low. However, other lists have committed Roseanne entirely, which is unfair.
As a standalone show, The Conners is strong by the standards of decades-later reboots.
It’s an example of a creatively successful way to reboot an older show while having a reason to exist and a story to tell, as well as a series pivoting on the fly when its star suddenly exited the picture.
However, it probably doesn’t deserve to land in the top 50 regarding the best sitcoms in history.
That said, the combined saga of the Conner Family is among the more significant achievements in the history of the sitcom form.
To follow a family like the Conners for a similar length of time is unheard of on TV.
In that respect alone, both shows and the Conners family deserve a spot amongst the best of US sitcoms.
