Some might have thought that The Conner’s might have never survived without Roseanne, but it’s easy to see at this point that they didn’t know the show quite as well as they’d thought. If they had then they would have known that the program had grown past being all about it’s titular star and had become more a sum of its parts than anything since people have come to know the rest of the family in a big and resounding way. Given that her character died off screen due to an opioid addiction one might think that this would be a serious kink in the whole idea of Roseanne and might upset too many viewers to make a continuation possible. But since the first season aired a lot of people have come to see that the tragedy of Roseanne being booted from her own show, as per a tweet mentioned by Billy Keveney of USA Today, has actually become a certified success. Whether season two will go down as smoothly and continue the day to day struggle of the Conners has yet to be seen, but overall it does seem as though the show is bound to stick around for a bit.
Honestly, thinking that the show couldn’t survive without Roseanne was kind of amusing since it would seem that some folks believed she WAS the show, when all along people had been getting used to the other characters and had come to like them over time. This is the kind of hubris that can unseat just about anyone since believing that they run the show, that it can’t go on without them, and that they can essentially do or say anything they like is a quality that a few stars throughout history have come to regret. There are still a lot of folks willing to make the argument for Roseanne and how she was kicked off her own show, but the reality is that ‘her’ show became less about her and more about the family very quickly, proving that she wasn’t the only one that mattered when it came to the success and livelihood of the program. How it will fare for another season is hard to say, but at the very least The Conner’s showed that Roseanna can be taken out of the picture and the show will continue to move forward. As Zach Vasquez from The Guardian might agree it likely has to do with the fact that the fans can now see the other characters and realize that they’re just as strong in their own ways when it comes to the story of the family and how they get by.
It does help that Dan is able to stand on his own as the patriarch of the family, while Darlene is in effect a lot like her mother in that she has the same biting and sarcastic wit and the same deadpan delivery that can cut a person down to size. Then there’s the reality of her sister Jackie, who’s a bit nutty and all over the place at times, but is still there and still dedicated to the family no matter what goes down. The way Becky has been written up makes her a bit problematic, but if you look back through the years you might find that Becky’s character was always a bit unstable and not altogether ‘there’ during the original run of the show. In other words she’s kind of been a flake that will show up when she’s absolutely needed but is otherwise kind of all over the place and isn’t the emotionally stable individual in the bunch. DJ has been less than a solid presence during the first season however and it’s easy to wonder if he’s going to be a more solid factor moving forward or if they’re going to keep him on the fringe. The downside to this would be that since he does have a family of his own, as Darlene does, it would be great to see more of them so that the family dynamic can be further explored and possibly open things up just a little more.
Do people miss Roseanne? Well sure, that’s not going to go away since she did help to start the show and was a big part of it for a long while. For quite some time she was one of the funniest women on TV and she helped usher in another era in programming that wasn’t always positive or well-received, but was at the very least funny and amusing to watch. But thinking that she could say or do anything that she wanted and not suffer any consequences for it definitely caught up to her since the tweets she delivered that caused such trouble for her lost Roseanne more than she was ready to part with. The fact that The Conner’s has done well to this point is almost like rubbing salt in the wound, at least to some folks. For others, like Michael Schneider of IndieWire, the show seems to work better without her.
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