Photo: ABC
The first thing to say about the ninth season of Roseanne is that it is a mess. Strange, scattered, and self-conscious, the last season of the show is a fundamentally different thing than the eight seasons that preceded it. And because the new Roseanne series is designed as a continuation of the original, season nine hangs around the show’s neck like the proverbial albatross. That albatross, in this case, is a strange retroactive dream sequence season involving death and trips to the Hamptons and at least one scene where Debbie Reynolds play-fights with a lightsaber. So what is the new Roseanne going to do with that? What should we do with it?
The answer for the new Roseanne is most likely to try as hard as possible to ignore everything about season nine, because it’s a season of TV that actively works to undo every distinctive thing about the identity of the show up until that point. After years of working in uncertain, unstable blue-collar jobs, the Conner family literally wins the lottery. Immediately, a show that’s been about financial stress and the importance of family jettisons the thing that has most defined it from the start. The lottery win doesn’t happen at the end of the show, where it could’ve acted as a strange but conclusive deus ex millions. It happens at the beginning of season nine, forcing the entire final season to become a fundamentally new show, separate from everything that happened before.
The lottery win isn’t the only change, either – at the end of season eight, Roseanne’s husband Dan has a heart attack and nearly dies, and then Roseanne leaves him when he comes home and quickly ignores the new diet meant to keep him alive. Most of season nine happens without Dan. He’s off in California caring for his mother, and then Roseanne discovers he’s been cheating on her, and then they reconcile but he’s still not around much.
Instead of the familiar debates about working-class life, or the core focus on the Conner’s marriage, season nine of Roseanne occupies its time with intense, scattered, self-conscious self-reflection. Much of it is preoccupied with television and the process of making television, including parodies of other TV shows (I Dream of Jeannie, The Honeymooners, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show). There’s an episode where the Conners ride a train to D.C. and Roseanne transforms into a Rambo figure in order to take down the terrorist hijackers. Steven Seagal shows up at the end. Late in the season, network executives arrive at Roseanne’s house to try to buy her life rights for TV development; most of the episode is about Roseanne’s frustration that the major networks want to sanitize her life and cable channel execs want to add as much nudity and sex as possible. I’m not even sure those are the strangest episodes, either — that honor might belong to the AbFab crossover Halloween episode, where Roseanne and Jackie attend a fancy NYC party and make friends with Patsy and Edina, who turn out to be members of a Satanic cult.
In the final episode of the series, we find Roseanne sitting in her basement, working on the memoir she’s been trying to write for so long. She narrates the last pages as a voice-over while we watch her sitting at her desk, writing and considering. Then the other shoe drops. Or it’s supposed to be the other shoe, but it feels more like an attempt to perform a narrative version of that memory-erasing flash pen from Men in Black. Dan did not actually recover from his heart attack, Roseanne tells us. He died, and Roseanne was so devastated that she lost months to imagining an alternate version of their life, one where Dan lived and they won the lottery and all kinds of odd things happened. It’s a St. Elsewhere ending, a retroactive declaration that all the bad stuff was a dream. The finale of the show is about Roseanne and Roseanne trying to erase as much of that last season as it can.
This puts the revival in an awkward, essentially impossible, but ultimately freeing place: It gets to ignore the parts of Roseanne’s ending that it doesn’t want to keep (Dan’s death), and keep the parts that it likes (the erasure of the entire ninth season). Except for a few family details like the birth of Becky’s daughter, Harris, the new series is really a revival of Roseanne season eight. Like the finale itself, the revival is another way to erase everything about season nine.
The temptation is to do exactly what Roseanne seems to be hoping we do: forget the whole thing ever happened, and pretend the original show ended right before the moment Dan had a heart attack. From a strict narrative logic standpoint, this is fairly bonkers — we have to keep the whole “the lottery was just a dream” thing, while also ignoring “Dan was dead the whole time.” From the perspective of network TV storytelling, though, it makes much more sense. For most sitcoms in the age of the original Roseanne, every episode is its own miniature stand-alone experiment, and the identity of a series is more about an identifiable status quo rather than any one particular plot development. The revival of Roseanne picks up from an imagined platonic ideal of the end of the last Roseanne, which doesn’t have to have any particular relationship to what actually happened.
But if we ignore season nine of the original series, we discard one of the most transparently self-conscious, candid seasons of television ever made, and with it, a road map to some of Roseanne and Roseanne’s most naked obsessions. Season nine of Roseanne is like a homunculus of Roseanne Barr’s fears and aspirations. It’s a season of TV about what happens when you suddenly have wealth, how to live outside a marriage that’s fallen apart, the strangeness of fad dieting and judgmental luxury spas, and most of all, what it’s like to have your actual self get flattened into and limited by a hugely popular fictional version of yourself. It’s a portrait of someone on TV who is deeply conflicted about the culture of being on TV, while also frantically trying to stay on TV.
If you ignore season nine, you also ignore a locus for one of the central questions of the Roseanne revival. How much of what you’re seeing is Roseanne Barr (whose pro-Trump, deliberately provocative stances have taken over her image), and how much is Roseanne Conner? Barr isn’t the showrunner, and she’s not on the writing staff, but the tension between the two figures feels inevitable. And if you ignore the Roseanne of season nine, you also miss the version of her who literally scolds television executives for misrepresenting her story, the woman who delivers jeremiads against Hollywood and who cheerfully thumbs her nose at the history of women on television.
I admit there’s another reason I’m loath to just throw out the ninth season of Roseanne, in spite of the fact that it is, by pretty much any measure, a bad, bad season of TV. It’s to do with the way it was bad, the weird, gutsy, just-throw-stuff-at-the-wall openness of it, like an improv sketch that took “yes, and…” way too far. Yes! They win the lottery and … Roseanne’s mom comes out at Thanksgiving and Jackie dates a prince and Roseanne summers with some WASPs and, yes, the Rambo train hijacking situation. It’s a sort of TV we’re moving farther and farther away from, a sort of TV that the current emphasis on seriality, completion, totality, and coherence would never allow to happen.
Maybe — probably — that’s a good thing. But there’s something thrilling about firing up a season nine episode of Roseanne and having your hair blown back in surprise and horrified shock. It’s a kind of experimentation I wish fictional TV now did more of, and did with the same devil-may-care joy that Roseanne often approached its oddball ideas. So while I do not resent the Roseanne revival’s choice to disregard almost all of that final season, there’s a part of me that hopes some tiny bit of its careless bravado remains.
Only a tiny bit, though. That season nine episode in the Hamptons is really rocky.
Photo: Adam Rose/ABC
Roseanne Dress to Impress Season 10 Episode 2 Editor's Rating 4 stars Complete Series Coverage
Lest you forget this is the Roseanne revival, “Dress to Impress” proves the Conners are going to keep being topical up in here!
Dan, for example, is not going to be shushed when he wants to voice his concerns about the way nine-year-old grandson Mark is dressing for school. Glittery skirts, fringed boots, and bold colors are the fashion statements that Mark likes to make. “He’s gonna get beat up, sure as hell,” is the statement Dan makes, while trying to convince Darlene she shouldn’t let the boy wear those clothes outside the house. Darlene gently tells her father (as gently as any Conner is capable of addressing any other Conner) that she has the situation under control. She’s read many books on the subject, and they all advise allowing Mark to express himself without the pressure of labeling his choices or freaking him out about other kids’ reactions.
But that’s partly Darlene trying to play it cool, and partly Darlene’s inherent instinct to rebel against her parents, because no matter what her age, being back in her childhood home will do that. When she has a private conversation with Mark’s older sister, Harris – a Darlene lookalike who possesses the sarcastic wit of Roseanne, Darlene, and Becky combined – she reveals she also has concerns about Mark’s safety, especially now that he and Harris will be going to different schools and there’s no one to keep an eye on him.
Roseanne – for those who assumed her Trump support meant she checked her humanity at the voting booth – decides to address the situation more directly. Before driving Mark to his first day of school in Lanford, she asks him if he feels like he’s a boy or a girl. He answers quickly and matter-of-factly: “A boy.” Then why, she asks, does he want to wear traditionally feminine clothing? “This just feels like me. I like colors that pop,” he says. “It’s more creative.” Granny Rose tells him he needs to know that he’ll have to pick your battles. But if this is important to him – and Mark confirms it is – she and the rest of the family are behind him.
For Roseanne, that means addressing Mark’s class when she drops him off, telling them how cool and creative he is (and warning that she’s a witch, in case they fail to respect his individuality). For Dan, it means sending Mark off with a hug the next day, after Darlene forgives her dad for his ill-conceived decision to give the boy a pocket knife to carry with him to school. And for Darlene, it means she has to have an uncomfortable talk with Mark, one in which she acknowledges his fashion choices will make his life at school more difficult, a thought she can barely express without crying. (Have I mentioned that Sara Gilbert is stealing the season so far?)
Meanwhile, in a storyline introduced in the season premiere, Mark’s Aunt Becky has also made a choice that proves controversial with Dan and Roseanne: She wants to be a surrogate mother. But now, her client – is that the correct term for the person who will pay $50,000 someone to have a child for her? – wants to meet the Conners before officially closing the deal. Dan was against the idea from the very beginning, and now that Roseanne has learned Becky will be using her own eggs to provide Andrea and her husband with a child, she’s also against the plan. As she warns Becky, that means the baby will be a biological Conner, so Becky should be prepared that one day Roseanne will kidnap her grandbaby and then end up in jail.
Come to think of it, Roseanne would fit in nicely with the Orange Is the New Black crew…
Couch Surfing
• Two big thumbs up to the casting of Ames McNamara as Mark. He’s a complicated character for any actor to play, but McNamara pulls it off with subtlety, the comic chops to shine in deep scenes with Roseanne, and an endless amount of charm.
• It’s only the second episode, but here’s hoping there’s a better storyline (or any storyline) for Jackie in the near future. She and Roseanne made up after their political feud in the premiere, and in this episode, she’s got little to do aside from reminding everyone that she’s “Lanford’s leading life coach.” It’s 2018, and we are all finally fully aware that Laurie Metcalf is a national treasure. Let’s see that reflected with a meaty Jackie storyline!
• Dan, after skirt-wearing Mark climbs up on pile of furniture to reach the hoop during a game of backyard basketball: “Okay, he doesn’t have to wear pants, but he’s gotta wear underwear.”
The current wave of television nostalgia has brought with it some successes and some failures, as reviving old favourites is likely to do. The rebooted Gilmore Girls, for example, was a strangely cold and unlovable affair, while Will & Grace has adapted itself to the modern age in a way that surprised those sceptical that its more neutered 90s incarnation would be at odds with today’s all-out-there confessional times. For a show that took until midway through its second season to even show two men (not lovers, but friends) kissing on the lips, Will & Grace is now bursting with risque gags and political bite, and it’s been a hit. It’s fresh because it has shifted its shape around its original template, and it feels as if there’s a reason for it to exist again.
When good TV goes bad: how Roseanne’s dream turned into a nightmare Read more
Is the same true for Roseanne? The series first aired 30 years ago, and its working-class comedy was blunt, down-to-earth and honest, particularly when it came to showing the reality of being broke. By the time it ended in 1997, it had collapsed into absurdity, with a self-flagellating final season in which the Conners won millions on the state lottery. There were cameos from Absolutely Fabulous’s Eddy and Patsy, but the last episode revealed the show to be a fiction written by Roseanne as a way of coping with Dan’s death from a heart attack. The old theory that entertainment should be aspirational appeared to have caught up with a show that was so likable because it had resolutely rejected that.
There’s no way it could stand in the reboot, so that storyline is quickly dispensed of using similar tricks, with the whole fiasco revealed as an old screenplay languishing in the garage that nobody picked up. “Dan? I thought you were dead,” cracks Roseanne, one of a trickle of in-jokes served up for old fans of the series, which are largely wry, and not too heavy-handed. The humour of the original, and particularly its earlier seasons, is faithfully replicated in that same way. The jokes are cutting, but only in the way that you’d playfully insult a family member. There’s an overall message of acceptance, that most things can be fixed with a conversation and a hug, though there’s enough acidity to cut through any saccharine and simplistic notion that love trumps all.
In today’s Roseanne, the family is at war, as much as it can ever be. Ex-cop Jackie voted for “the worst person alive”, and she’s got the pussy hat to prove it. Roseanne and Dan supported Trump because he promised jobs. Barr has discussed her own support for Trump before, and amid much controversy, but the decision to give fictional Roseanne the same political leanings seems as matter-of-fact as the show was in its heyday. And as the Conners’ life plays out, it’s neither better nor worse under the Trump administration.
Darlene has returned home because she’s divorced and out of work; Becky is so strapped for cash that she’s attempting to become a surrogate (in a nice nod, for a woman played by Sarah Chalke, who picked up the role of Becky from Lecy Goranson, now back, in 1993). You get the sense that the family’s slide from being broke to really broke began long before the present, but you also get the sense that nothing much is changing. Take the price of medication: “You get half the drugs for twice the price.” It doesn’t begin to touch on race, however, and that’s one of the few points about its political jocularity that jars; perhaps it will address this in episodes to come.
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Age is a recurring theme, and there’s a vein of sadness drawn from that which provides more heart than the acerbic political back-and-forths. Darlene has not managed to be the writer she hoped she would become. “I thought I could buy a huge house and hold that over your head,” she says, bleakly, of her return home. Dan and Roseanne are getting old, and celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary, and they’re still juggling credit cards to make ends meet. “Do you get points on your credit card?” asks Darlene. “We get threats: is that the same thing?” Roseanne shoots back.
There are moments in which the new showrunners Bruce Helford and Whitney Cummings attempt to drag the Conners into the present. There’s a storyline about Darlene’s young son, Mark, who prefers pink leggings and painted nails to plaid shirts and cargo shorts, and Roseanne and Dan have to learn to trust his own sense of who he is. But really, it’s at its most comfortable when it’s playing the old notes. The jokes are dry and scrape the surface of meanness, while never lacking warmth; Becky is as bratty as ever, while Darlene is as vicious, though JD, now a soldier back from a stint in Syria, barely gets a look-in. It all comes together to make this a fine comedy in parts, even good at times, and it’s a relief in many ways that it doesn’t try to be more.
