REVIEW: Roseanne’s death by opiod doesn’t do much to elevate ABCs reboot, ‘The Conners’

Ding dong the witch is dead, but does anyone care?

Going into the season premiere of The Conners with an open mind, I have to say, I was left with…not much.

Roseanne thegrioo.com
The cast of Roseanne is now The Conners. (ABC)

Coming up in the 1980s and 1990s, I gravitated toward sitcoms with characters who looked like me. The Cosby Show, A Different World, Family Matters, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and a mess of Black shows that aren’t as beloved (remember Homeboys From Outer Space?). Roseanne wasn’t one of those shows.

Airing on ABC from 1988 to 1997, the hijinks of a white, working-class suburban Chicago family led by schlubby parents played by Roseanne Barr and John Goodman didn’t connect with me – an inner-city black kid with divorced parents – the way Will Smith did, but due to its insane popularity, I knew the characters’ names on Roseanne and caught an episode or two.

Indeed, I was not clearing my DVR for the 2017 Roseanne reboot, which included most of the original cast. I cared even less when I found out that Barr would turn her character, Roseanne Conner into a Donald Trump supporter replicating her real life political mindset. I don’t think anything is wrong with centering a television show around Trump supporters who clearly swarm around us like fruit flies; I just don’t care to tune in.

Barr’s Trump love, along with some questionable story lines from the rebooted season, didn’t stop the show from getting greenlit for an 11th season. But, in one of the most stunning and publicized examples of Twitter coming at you fast, ABC flat-out canned Roseanne last May after Barr linked former Barack Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to a Planet of the Apes character in a tweet. Because apparently she missed that day in fourth grade where they teach you that referring to Black folks as anything simian-related is never a good look.

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Far be it from a major television studio to kill the golden goose, though: Tuesday night saw the series premiere of The Conners – essentially season 11 of Roseanne without Roseanne herself. I appreciate that everyone involved with the reboot continues to get paid despite Barr’s stupid ass comments. However, going into the season premiere with an open mind, I have to say, I was left with…not much.

The show’s humor feels out dated like from the 1990s with many of the jokes feeling as stale as aged like beignets from Café du Monde after 24 hours. With such highbrow, envelope-pushing sitcoms on premium and basic cable networks, it’s hard to get hyped about a forced laugh track on a show where the characters can’t even say “shit.”

I also don’t see many Black folks connecting with the humor in The Conners. Sure, they gave Michael Fishman’s D.J. a Black wife (Geena, played by Maya Lynne Robinson) and their Black daughter Mary (Jayden Rey), but I doubt they’ll be courting the Insecure or Atlanta crowds anytime soon.

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The writers killing off Roseanne by way of an opioid overdose is interesting: the family discovers she received the pills from multiple people via a soccer mom drug ring of sorts because she couldn’t afford them through conventional means. Barr, for her part, doesn’t seem to be taking her on screen demise too well or the fact that the character that shot her to fame 30 years ago was iced so unceremoniously.

Through her spiritual teacher Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Barr felt the need to issue a statement about where the show went last night.

“While we wish the very best for the cast and production crew of ‘The Conners,’ all of whom are deeply dedicated to their craft and were Roseanne’s cherished colleagues, we regret that ABC chose to cancel ‘Roseanne’ by killing off the Roseanne Conner character. That it was done through an opioid overdose lent an unnecessary grim and morbid dimension to an otherwise happy family show.”

Did she ever stop to think that the opioid story line might be an indictment on the health care industry or a jab against Barr’s beloved Trump, who has demonstrated that he cares as much about the health of working class Americans as he does about not being a utter shit stick to women?

The best part of the episode is Goodman’s Dan Conner struggling with the death of his wife: he wears the pain masterfully in the lines of his newly-slender visage. He almost makes you slightly remorseful at Roseanne’s “death,” but then you start thinking of Miss Jarrett.

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There are a few lines in the episode that seem to wink and nod at both the departed Barr and that expired bottle of Orange Fanta in the White House: Dan asks “who am I supposed to be mad at now?” when he learns that Roseanne got the pills that killed her from multiple sources. “Has anyone noticed how much better the flow is between the kitchen and the sink?” asks Roseanne’s sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) in the episode’s final words.

It would take someone else who loved Roseanne since 1988 to speak intelligently on whether the show suffers from Barr’s departure – I know that I couldn’t imagine Martin Lawrence getting kicked off Martin and it becoming Cole and Co. or Will Smith getting the Aunt Vivian #1 treatment and Fresh Prince becoming The Bank$. The magic was in the main characters of those shows.

If The Conners’ premiere is any indicator, something is indeed missing. there is thuis feeling of emptiness, but only time will tell if that something is Roseanne Barr.


Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.

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