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America has spent a year being crazy about "Roseanne".
Some people were furious that the resumption brought Roseanne Conner (Roseanne Barr), feminist television actress, as a supporter of Donald Trump (who touted the show's ratings as a map of the constituency). Others were crazy when ABC was fired by Barr after posting a racist tweet in May and planning to bring back the cast without it.
"The Conners", the Roseanne sans-Roseanne returned Tuesday night to offer their audience not a fight, but a good cry of cathartic laughter. It was disturbing, raw and funny. But it also looked more like "Roseanne" than the rebirth of last spring.
Little spoiler warning: Roseanne is dead. It was the only responsible choice, not to symbolically punish the character but to make it definitive and avoid an ugly, long and inevitably politicized return campaign.
It also instantly gave "The Conners" a premise, a reason to exist beyond nostalgia. "The family advances after a death" is a faithful premise of the sitcom (that's how they all became the Brady Bunch). But making the public known to the public for a long time, as well as the family, is a challenge and an opportunity.
The first, written by Bruce Helford, Bruce Rasmussen and Dave Caplan, was opened three weeks after Roseanne 's death, long enough for her to look OK. laugh – for the audience, that's it. As for the Conner family, as Becky (Lecy Goranson) pointed out, "Laughing inappropriately is what mom taught us to do."
While the premiere of "The Conners" was too bitter-sweet to be wildly hilarious, Roseanne laughed past her grave. When Becky, for example, suggested deferring the bills on the pretext that their mother had died, Darlene (Sara Gilbert) said it was too late: "Mom has already used it five times".
John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf, who are fortunately two of the best primetime actors, have largely weighed in dramatically. Jackie (Metcalf) spent the episode of housework at home, a manic gesture sublimating a mourning that seemed symbolic even before arriving on the iconic couch.
The new widower Dan (Goodman), meanwhile, ran through the episode as though he was half dead himself. Dan is an entrepreneur – he repairs things – and he could not accept the idea that "repairing" Roseanne's knees was not enough to save her. He looked a lot like his old man when his grandson Mark (Ames McNamara) brought him a problem to solve. He then decided to choose the boy next to whom to participate in a field trip. He worked brilliantly in the story of the new family.
The big revelation of the first was that Roseanne had died of an opioid overdose after developing an addiction in the spring. Barr, who Last month, the podcast spoiled the content of its podcast by calling it "insult." But this decision was rather a compliment to the legacy of its creation, a show that at best consisted of dealing with real problems – death, domestic violence, unemployment – with hard love and acid humor.
In addition, we already knew what really killed Roseanne Conner: the racism of Roseanne Barr. The meta-cause of the character's absence could not help but suspend the premiere of "Conners". And in a certain way, Roseanne's ejection was a kind of refutation of the premise of the first rebirth of "Roseanne".
Part of the recovery was that families could have deep, hurtful divisions about the elections and the state of America, but ultimately only politics. (This has also been a theme of the new more conciliatory episodes of "Last Man Standing" on Fox.)
It was nice to hear, but it was not totally honest. He took the example of Barr's real life to point out that current schisms in the United States are not just about politics, in the sense of marginal tax rates or health care policy. They are also about decency and empathy and dehumanization. (Barr compared a former Obama African-American assistant to a monkey.) This is a moral line on which, once Barr has crossed them, you simply can not agree to disagree. You must make a choice.
ABC did and, by doing so, released the Conners to be themselves.
I still do not know if "The Conners" is more than an epilogue, but there is room for growth. Gilbert is now essentially the lead role – Darlene dropped into Roseanne's empty chair during the final kitchen table sequence – and her dry, genious Gen X humor could give "The Conners" a voice. distinct from Barr's executioner. Much remains to be done with the underdeveloped family branch of D.J. (Michael Fishman), his soldier wife, Geena (Maya Lynne Robinson), and their daughter, Mary (Jayden Rey).
But the show will have to go beyond not only a death, but the ghost of the last season of "Roseanne", which the political moment has transformed, like so many things, into its least subtle version.
"Roseanne" was once more nuanced than the partisan advocate that the Trumpenkulturkampf had created. He acknowledged that people are complex and imperfect. And so, in the end, the first "Conners".
Still worried about his wife's death, Dan thought he had found someone to blame Marcy Bellinger (Mary Steenburgen), whose name was about the pain killers he had found in the house. It turned out that Roseanne had asked Marcy (and others) for the pills and that they had to be part of a network of neighbors who were exchanging drugs they could not afford.
What killed Roseanne, in a sense, is what has often supported the Conners: the willingness of people to put aside their judgment and help them. "Who am I supposed to be angry at now?" Dan asks Darlene.
"I thought Marcy Bellinger was a very good choice," says Darlene, "until she spoiled it by being sad, human and everything else."
The return of "The Conners" has certainly been heavy and troubling. It was also sad and human, and funny, too. The question is whether there is room for this in a country of people who still want someone to be angry at it.
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