The ABC sitcom The Conners was renewed on May 2 for Season 7, which the network has announced will be the show’s last.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Spicing Things Up – The Conners
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.
How Crazy Will It Get? – The Conners
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.
