Classic TV: Roseanne
October 18, 1988-May 27, 1997
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know who Roseanne Barr was. She’s one of those celebrities who is really, truly famous – pretty much everybody who was conscious during the nineties knows who she is. Even though I’ve been aware of Roseanne (the person and the sitcom) for years, I’ve recently plowed through all nine seasons, having had only a casual interest in the show before. Sitcoms are my favourite TV genre and I know that no sitcom education would be complete without a thorough knowledge of this classic show.
Roseanne was the story of the Conner family: Roseanne (played by Barr, of course), the overbearing and confronting but ultimately loving mother, Dan (John Goodman), who worked with and against Roseanne in equal measure, Becky (Lecy Goranson, then Sarah Chalke, then Lecy Goranson, then Sarah Chalke), the bratty teenage daughter, Darlene (Sara Gilbert), the sarcastic one, and DJ (Michael Fishman), the odd youngest child. Completing the regular cast was Roseanne’s perenially unlucky but hilarious sister Jackie (Laurie Metcalf). They live in the fictional town of Lanford, Illinois, and their small town saw a huge cast of recurring characters passing through, some appearing for a few episodes and some lasting for multiple seasons.
Most of the storylines arose from money problems, with Roseanne and Dan working a series of low-paying, boring jobs, and the kids growing up, fighting with their parents and amongst each other. The show depicts life in a small American town, and although I don’t have any experience of that, it feels like the most genuine portrayal of such a life that I’ve seen on TV. One of the key reasons the show was so successful was because it was so real – every family, small town or big city, rich or poor, could find a plotline in Roseanne to relate to – even the theme song was perfect and represented the show brilliantly.
Roseanne herself is a polarising woman. Love her or hate her, it is undeniable that without her vision, this show could have been boring, generic and over within a few years. It was Roseanne’s ruthless search for what she wanted that caused her show to rise above and beyond regular sitcoms, and it was an exploration of real life problems rather a collection of one-liners and clichéd stories. The jokes were always the most important element, and my god were they funny, but there were so many other details that made it all work so well.
The heart of the show were the three main adults. Roseanne & Dan had what has been often called the most realistic marriage on television, with fighting and romance in equal measure, living almost hand to mouth most of the time. When they could provide extra for their family, it was a momentous occasion, and as their financial situation improved and they got better jobs, their characters developed along with them. Speaking of character development, Jackie went from a confident but troubled woman to the Roseanne version of Cosmo Kramer, wacky and neurotic but always funny. Jackie is perhaps my favourite Roseanne character beyond Roseanne herself, she was given a lot of the best lines and stories, and Laurie Metcalf was constantly amazing even when her character went off the rails.
Becky is a very strange character, one of the most memorable in sitcom history but for odd reasons. She was originally played by Lecy Goranson for the first five or so years, and Goranson’s Becky was bratty, unreasonable and often unlikeable, but the acting was always great and Becky had her moments. She struggles with what her TV mother struggled with – does she make use of her talents (Roseanne wanted to be a writer, Becky is a straight-A student who wants to be a doctor), or does she marry young, start a family, and give up on bigger dreams? Ultimately she elopes with her dumb boyfriend Mark (Glenn Quinn), and it is around this time that Goranson left to attend university and the role was then played by Sarah Chalke. This brought about some personality changes to the character, who became less snarky, happier and a bit oblivious. It was almost as if Darlene’s often unfair opinion of Becky as an airhead had come to life with this actor change. Goranson returned for the eighth season (prompting Roseanne to ask “where the hell have you been?” – just one of several hilarious in-jokes made about the switch), but soon left again, after a very strange run of episodes where the two actresses alternated in the role. Chalke was ultimately left the role for the remainder of the series, but she was never really given any meaty or interesting scenes.
The only great Becky scenes in later seasons were saved for when the original was back. The final scene to feature Lecy Goranson had Becky and Darlene pondering the mortality of their own father, an emotional moment that Sarah Chalke never got a chance to prove herself worthy of. Sometimes Becky is just absent with no explanation – in the season nine episode ‘Home Is Where The Afghan Is’, what the hell is her husband Mark doing at the family Thanksgiving without her? Mark would appear more often than Becky in these late episodes.
Darlene is without a doubt my favourite sitcom kid ever. Sara Gilbert’s acting – comedic and dramatic – was way beyond her years, like the sitcom version of little Michael Jackson singing ‘I’ll Be There’. You have to remind yourself that the person with all this talent is also so young. Her contributions were on par with her adult co-stars, and she often got the best lines in any given episode. Her boyfriend-then-eventual-husband-and-also-brother-of-Becky’s-husband-Mark, David, played brilliantly by Johnny Galecki, moved into the Conner household and became an unofficial son to Roseanne & Dan, and the joint David’n'Darlene storylines were some of the best and most engaging the show had to offer.
And this is all without mentioning Michael Fishman’s perfectly awkward and awkwardly perfect DJ, Estelle Parsons as Roseanne and Jackie’s horrifically annoying mother Bev, Shelly Winters as the inappropriate Nana Mary (making use of the “rude grandma” schtick years before Betty White got a hold of it), Roseanne’s best friend Crystal (Natalie West), who went from regular to recurring to absent as it became more and more obvious that her character added very little to the show, although she had her moments. There was also Martin Mull as Leon, Roseanne’s friend/arch nemesis who began as her manager at a small restaurant and eventually became co-owner of her diner, and Sandra Bernhard as Nancy, a sort-of replacement for Crystal who was dumb and self-centred but never in a malicious way. These two were also important because Leon was gay and Nancy was bisexual, and the actors gave two of the most honest and non-stereotypical portrayals of sexuality in TV history. Leon wasn’t overly flamboyant and Nancy wasn’t a flannel-wearing trucker, they were just regular people. It’s refreshing to see now in 2011, I can’t imagine how great it would have been to see in the early nineties. In addition to all these great supporting characters there was Fred, Booker, Arnie, Fisher, Heather, Iris, Anne-Marie, Chuck, Scott, Charlotte, Molly, Bonnie, Ziggy – has another sitcom ever had such a huge cast that worked so incredibly well with each other?
The first four seasons are usually considered “classic Roseanne”, and this is mostly true. This was the show at its most basic and most hilarious – kids in high school, Roseanne going from job to job, Dan going through spells of unemployment and occasional success, just like most people go through in real life. During the fifth season, the Conners open the Lanford Lunch Box, a diner, with Jackie, Nancy and Bev, who eventually sells her share to Leon. Dan also gets a job working for the city, and the family start to be a bit better off financially. This is also where Becky and Darlene started to appear less frequently, and while the show was still great, it was different (and so was Roseanne – plastic surgeries made her barely recognisable when compared to the Roseanne of the first season). It would often be apparent that the real life Roseanne had something to say and was going to use this platform to say it. The show became “issue of the week” television. For a while during season seven it seems that every episode had a new hard-hitting issue to deal with: will Roseanne have an abortion? Does Darlene do drugs? Is yet another character gay? Is DJ a racist? Did Nana Mary have abortions when she was young? Does DJ have a learning disability? Is Bev an alcoholic? All this in the same season – it gets to be a little bit too much. Thank god the writing was so good and sometimes these issues would lead to genuinely great acting which justified the self-indulgence.
In the ninth season, the Conners and Jackie win the lottery. The ninth season is one of the most notorious full seasons in television history, with all the reality of the previous seasons thrown out the window. It was basically a different show, one in which the characters from Absolutely Fabulous show up, one in which Roseanne fights terrorists on a train, one in which it seemed every other episode was a dream sequence or a parody of another show. If the previous eight seasons hadn’t been so brilliant, this ninth season could have killed all the love I have for Roseanne. How ironic that the theme song for this year had lyrics that started with “if what doesn’t kill us is making us stronger” – all the money struggles are gone, and it’s hard to relate to the people you’ve known as being poor for eight seasons suddenly becoming millionaires. The “fish out of water” story was already being done at the time on rival sitcom The Nanny, and much better, so what was the point of this?
But then there was the final episode. Controversial for many fans, I actually really appreciate the last episode, as I think it returned to the poignant and (in a strange way) realistic tone of the early seasons. It is so famous that I knew exactly what happened even before I ever regularly watched the show. In an epic monologue, Roseanne explains to the audience that the series was mostly a book being written by her character. In the real in-show universe, Becky was with David and Darlene was with Mark, rather than the other way around and Jackie was a lesbian rather than her mother Bev, who came out suddenly late in the series. Most heartbreakingly, Dan had died of a heart attack at the end of the eighth season, and as a way of dealing with this grief, Roseanne imagined that the family had won the lottery. As she walks through her old house, back to normal and without all the renovations that had come with winning the imaginary lotto, the following quote appears on screen:
“Those who dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.”
And Roseanne’s laugh is heard one last time. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t one of the most brilliantly executed finales I’ve seen, and the emotional rollercoaster of the episode makes me almost appreciate the madness of the ninth season and why it had to happen.
Honest and dramatic and consistent, but most of all funny, watching Roseanne from beginning to end over the past few weeks really makes it clear to me why this is considered such a classic series. From the cast to the settings to the writing to the moments where they break the fourth wall to the chicken shirt to the offscreen controversies, it all adds up and makes one of the most accomplished and brilliant sitcoms in the history of the medium.
