The Conners Review: Without Roseanne Barr, it's better than Roseanne

Roseanne Barr is not seen at all in "The Conners" – not even, it seems, in the photos taken around the family home. But the enduring memory of his character still hangs over the Conner clan, at least in two episodes shown to critics on Friday.

ABC has kept an eye on "The Conners", its new spin-off "Roseanne" born from the ashes of racist extinction of Twitter by Roseanne Barr. This means that viewers still do not know what to expect during the premiere of this Tuesday, which is an apparently strange strategy.

This is because, at the request of the executive producers of the show, ABC has chosen to keep the details of the return extremely vague during the promotion of the show. Advertising photos of the barrel-free distribution have only recently been published. Studio audiences signed non-disclosure contracts before watching a recording. That's why the details of the set were not revealed. And even TV critics did not send copies of the series in advance.

In the world of cinema, such retention sends a negative signal: the studio clearly tries to mitigate bad reviews by holding until the last minute. This is not the case here, but ABC probably should have done more to set the stage.

What happened to Roseanne Conner? ABC is clearly on the curiosity of whether the character will be killed or not; if the new show will adopt a different tone without its star of the same name; and how much weight an extremely lean John Goodman has lost.

On Friday, ABC invited reporters to its offices in New York and Los Angeles, where she screened the first, with the warning that reporters would not reveal the fate of Roseanne Conner before it aired.

This review will not reveal this secret – although much speculation has already been leaked online, including by Barr herself on social media. And the fans who watched the show last season have already seen allusions to some of the difficulties that Roseanne Conner was secretly facing.

Laurie Metcalf, Sarah Gilbert, Lecy Goranson, John Goodman, "The Conners"

ABC

In the real world, of course, Barr is absent from the show for very different reasons. It's been a few months and the news cycle has changed hundreds of times since, so here's a quick reminder: In a May 29 Twitter post, Barr likened the former Obama advisor to the White House , Valerie Jarrett, to "If the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes have had a baby. The tweet was quickly criticized for its racism and Disney / ABC quickly canceled his return to "Roseanne", despite incredible odds.

Shortly thereafter, ABC has teamed up with producers, including Sara Gilbert (who plays Darlene), about the barrel-free rescue. At the time, some had speculated that the new series would call "Darlene" and would focus on that character while she was raising her own children, just like her. Roseanne Conner in the original series.

The producers decided to keep the focus on the whole family by calling it "The Conners," but it's clear that Gilbert has now inherited the series's central role as a wise but vulnerable matriarch, struggling to keep his family. And after playing Darlene (well, with a gap of 20 years) for 30 years, it's almost impossible to see Gilbert so naturally play Darlene as his mother's daughter. She has a little Roseanne Conner in it since we remember her since 1988, not 2018.

Gilbert is at the center of much of the premiere of "The Conners" because the characters in the series all deal with the lack of Roseanne in different ways. Aunt Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) can not stop cleaning and organizing the house; Dan (John Goodman) takes it from someone (Mary Steenburgen) to whom he attributes the situation; Becky (Lecy Goranson) continues to be a functional alcoholic; and D.J. (Michael Fishman) is still a strange man, although his wife Geena (Maya Lynne Robinson) returns from combat in Afghanistan, giving the show its only traditional family unit.

Among Roseanne's children, Darlene considers that Roseanne's absence is the most difficult. This leads to an exchange between Dan and her that comes closest to the series, addressing the collapse of Barr's real life: when Darlene mentions that she would like to know more about what her mother was preparing, Dan responds: " It would not have mattered. She was going to do what she was going to do. She has never listened to a damn person in her life. "

Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, told IndieWire in August, that "we felt like there were a lot of stories to tell" in defending the decision of & # 39; Go ahead with "The Conners". to be said in this family. And our desire to put on a show in a working Midwestern town that has not diminished. "

Ironically, without Barr's distraction and politics, it could now be easier. Much of the attention to Roseanne's revival was tied to Barr's unwavering support for Donald Trump-and the way his character imitated those views.

As many of them have pointed out, the character of Roseanne Conner, who had come back to life, seemed out of touch and was not comfortable with Roseanne's viewers, who have been remembered for the first years of the series. . In an article in BuzzFeed News, several original authors of "Roseanne" indicated that they did not recognize the more open politics of renewal and that Roseanne Conner would have had serious education problems and attitudes towards women.

Trump's slogan eclipsed the more personal stories in the series, including how Darlene fought as a single parent of a 16-year-old rebellious girl and a young son who was just beginning to explore her sexuality.

Now, this is the heart of the series and the attention is not focused on the politics of his main character. And it's not just Darlene's fate: every character in this series faces his own disappointment, because his life has not come to fruition as planned. Life in Lanford does not look very different from what it was 30 years ago, and it lends itself to a dark and somewhat tragic comedy.

Without Barr, "The Conners" also has the opportunity to delve into the thorny emotional subject of what happens to an already disrupted family unit when the key person who keeps them all together is suddenly no longer there.

Barr was so present on Roseanne that it was hard to imagine the series without her. After all, the opening credits featured her in the center of the kitchen table and ended with a loud sneer. Almost everything that is important in the series has included one way or the other. (ABC also asked reporters not to reveal anything about new credits, but it's obvious that the way this is handled is also changed.)

There is no real precedent for "The Conners", given the circumstances that forced ABC to return Barr in June. Many have compared it to "Valerie," the mid-1980s sitcom starring Valerie Harper, whose character was killed after he left a contractual dispute. The show continued under the names "Valerie's Family" and "The Hogan Family" – but "Valerie" has only been on the air for two years and was not a touchstone of pop culture when Harper left. This made it easy to reshape a show that did not really have a shape to begin with.

"Two and Half Men" is perhaps a more relevant, more recent comparison: Star Charlie Sheen was fired after a public collapse. CBS and executive producer Chuck Lorre decided to kill his character and continue by projecting Ashton Kutcher in front of existing stars.

But in this case, "Roseanne" had just returned, in a crisis of nostalgia, after 20 years. The viewers have grown up with these characters and have a different relationship with them. This is probably where ABC invented his marketing tie to promote "The Conners", simply asking "What's next?"

Here is the next step: life goes on. In episode 4 (also presented to critics), Darlene is well aware that her relationship with David (guest star Johnny Galecki) is truly over, is shocked by the news of her daughter Harris (Emma Kenney) and meets a new love interest (guest). Justin Long stars).

Darlene is not Roseanne. But with Barr out of the series, "The Conners" can finally be "Roseanne".

Grade: B +

"The Conners" will be presented on Tuesday, October 16 at 8 pm AND on ABC.

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