Review: ‘The Conners’ Is a Bittersweet Pill

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Sara Gilbert, left, and Laurie Metcalf in “The Conners,” the reconfigured version of “Roseanne” that resulted from the firing of the former star, Roseanne Barr.CreditCreditEric McCandless/ABC

By James Poniewozik

Oct. 17, 2018

America has spent a year being mad about “Roseanne.”

Some people were mad that the revival brought back Roseanne Conner (Roseanne Barr), TV’s feminist spitfire, as a supporter of Donald Trump (who touted the show’s ratings like an Electoral College map). Others were mad when ABC fired Barr, after she posted a racist tweet in May, and made plans to bring back the cast without her.

“The Conners,” the sans-Roseanne “Roseanne,” returned Tuesday night to offer its audience not a fight but a good, cathartic laugh-cry. It was unsettling and raw and fitfully funny. But it also felt more like “Roseanne” than last spring’s revival did.

Not-much-of-a-spoiler alert: Roseanne is dead. This was the only responsible choice, not to symbolically punish the character but to make it final and avoid an ugly, protracted and inevitably politicized comeback campaign.

It also instantly gave “The Conners” a premise, a reason to exist beyond nostalgia. “Family moves on after a death” is a trusty sitcom premise (that’s the way they all became the Brady Bunch). But to have the loss be someone the audience has known as long and as well as family is a challenge, and an opportunity.

The premiere, written by Bruce Helford, Bruce Rasmussen and Dave Caplan, opened three weeks after Roseanne’s death, long enough for it to seem O.K. to laugh — for the audience, that is. As for the Conner family, as Becky (Lecy Goranson) pointed out, “Laughing inappropriately is what Mom taught us to do.”

While “The Conners” premiere was too bittersweet to be wildly hilarious, some of its biggest laughs came through Roseanne from beyond the grave. When Becky, for instance, suggested putting off the bills with the excuse their mother had died, Darlene (Sara Gilbert) said it was too late: “Mom used that herself like five times.”

Much of the premiere’s dramatic weight fell on John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf, who fortunately are two of the best actors in prime time. Jackie (Metcalf) spent the episode cleaning house, an act of manic, sublimated grief that felt symbolic even before she got to the iconic couch.

The new widower Dan (Goodman), meanwhile, shuffled through the episode as if half dead himself. Dan’s a contractor — he repairs things — and he couldn’t accept the idea that “fixing” Roseanne’s knees wasn’t enough to save her. He became most like his old self when his grandson Mark (Ames McNamara) brought him a problem to solve, deciding which boy to sit next to on a field trip, sweetly working a coming-out story into the new family dynamic.

The premiere’s big revelation was that Roseanne died of an opioid overdose, having developed an addiction in the spring season. Barr, who spoiled the twist on a podcast last month, called it an “insult.” But if anything, the decision was a compliment to the legacy of her creation, a show that at its best was about facing real problems — death, domestic abuse, unemployment — with tough love and acid humor.

John Goodman, left, and Ames McNamara in "The Conners."CreditEric McCandless/ABC

Besides, we already knew what really killed Roseanne Conner: Roseanne Barr’s racism. The meta-cause for the character’s absence couldn’t help but hang over the “Conners” premiere. And in a way, Roseanne’s ejection was a kind of refutation of the premise of the earlier “Roseanne” revival.

The revival made the case, in part, that families could have deep, hurtful divisions over the election and the state of America but that, in the end, these were just politics. (This has also been a theme of the new, more conciliatory episodes of “Last Man Standing” on Fox.)

That was nice to hear, but it wasn’t totally honest. It took the example of the real-life Barr to point out that the schisms in America right now aren’t just about politics, in the sense of marginal tax rates or health care policy. They’re also about decency and empathy and dehumanization. (Barr likened an African-American former Obama aide to an ape.) These are moral lines that — once someone like Barr crosses them — you can’t simply agree to disagree about. You have to make a choice.

ABC did, and in the process, it freed the Conners to be themselves.

I’m still not sure if “The Conners” works as more than an epilogue, but it has room to grow. Gilbert is now essentially the lead — Darlene dropped into Roseanne’s empty chair in the show’s closing kitchen-table sequence — and her dry, Gen X humor could give “The Conners” a distinct voice from Barr’s gleeful bullhorn. There’s still plenty to do 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 get past not just a death but the ghost of the last “Roseanne” season, which the political moment turned, like so many things, into the least subtle version of itself.

“Roseanne” was once more nuanced than the partisan proxy that the Trumpenkulturkampf made it. It recognized that people are complex and flawed. And so, in the end, did the first “Conners.”

Still reeling over his wife’s death, Dan believed he’d found someone to blame in Marcy Bellinger (Mary Steenburgen), whose name was on the painkillers he found in the house. Roseanne, it turned out, had asked Marcy (and others) for the pills and they’d obliged, as part of a network of neighbors who swap medications they struggle to afford.

What killed Roseanne, in a way, was what had often sustained the Conners: the willingness of people to set aside judgment and help. “Who am I supposed to be mad at now?” Dan asks Darlene.

“I thought Marcy Bellinger was a pretty good choice,” Darlene says, “until she ruined it by being all sad and human and stuff.”

The return of “The Conners,” for sure, was heavy and unsettling. It was also sad and human and stuff, and funny, too. The question is whether there’s room for it in a country of people who still want someone to be mad at.