And a 1992 episode features a skeptical speech directed to a state representative who promises tax breaks for corporations as a way to revitalize the local economy. In the first season’s finale, Roseanne inspires her fellow workers to quit their jobs when a new supervisor raises quotas on production she then jokingly compares herself to Sally Field’s character in Norma Rae. On the other hand, the show was aggressively critical of low wages and big business. Roseanne’s sister Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) at one point scolds, “Your problem is that you and Dan don’t know how to manage your money, and that’s why you’re always broke.” On one hand, the show was gently critical of the Conner family’s finances. If unpaid bills and time clocks were largely absent from other family sitcoms, Roseanne brought them to center stage as Roseanne and Dan work overtime and cycle through odd jobs to make ends meet. Still, the show refused to disentangle the Conners’ loving bark from the working world’s bite. ![]() When Darlene’s teacher suggests her behavior might reflect “a problem at home,” Roseanne retorts, “Our whole family barks.” “I put eight hours a day at the factory, and then I come home and put in another eight hours,” Roseanne tells her husband Dan (John Goodman) in the pilot episode, “Life and Stuff.” Roseanne runs errands, makes dinner, and fights with her boss (George Clooney) to clock out early-so she can meet with a teacher about why her daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert) has been barking like a dog. While these shows portrayed the working mothers as polished professionals, Roseanne reinvented the primetime American family around the materfamilias in all of her overworked, exasperated glory. The Cosby Show’s Clair Huxtable was a successful lawyer and affectionate mother, while Growing Pains’ Maggie Seaver even left her husband at home with the kids while she returned to her career as a reporter. Barr became an unlikely icon, what she called in 1990 “a sort of postfeminist mud pie in the eye to the Super Mom Syndrome.” Other family sitcoms were eager to portray women who had it all. Vogue had taken notice of Barr’s comedy routines, anointing her in 1987 as the “rude voice of women” who had been silenced onscreen. She cracked jokes about marriage and motherhood drawn from her own life, which she more seriously chronicled in her 1989 autobiography. They represent inoffensiveness with a dirty face.” While Roseanne’s significance will likely change in 2018, its birth out of the 1980s culture wars hinged on one question: Could a family sitcom be a political statement without actually being political?īarr had already made a name for herself as a stand-up comic, performing her “Domestic Goddess” routine on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Comparing them to their blue-collar comrades from All in the Family, Walter Goodman argued in The New York Times that, “despite appearances, the Conners are throwbacks to a kinder, gentler sitcom. Sarcastic and often unruly, the Conners were, as Variety’s review of the first episode remarked, “appalling TV role models.” Other reviewers read the show’s touted radicalism as superficial. Commissioned by the executive producers of The Cosby Show, Roseanne offered a different kind of family sitcom, one that brought the white working class to the small screen in an era of yuppiedom. But if the return of Roseanne in 2018 ends up feeling more reactionary than it does revolutionary, it’d be largely because the original series inspired these same concerns about the politics of the sitcom.Įnter Roseanne. Combined with Roseanne TV spots promising the return of the family that “lives like us” and “looks like us”-with all of the fraught connotations of those words-one might believe the all-American family had been banished from network television. Such comments could be seen as a swipe at ABC’s current line-up of sitcoms celebrated for their diversity, like Modern Family, Black-ish, The Goldbergs, and Fresh Off the Boat. Fans of the original questioned the reboot’s decision to get so overtly political, but Barr defended her decision to create “a realistic portrait of the American people.” Likewise, the show’s executive producer, Bruce Helford, has promised that the series will depict “something that doesn’t really exist on TV anymore, which is an honest family.” ![]() ![]() Controversy has already surrounded the new season following the announcement that the title character will be, like the outspoken star Roseanne Barr herself, a Donald Trump supporter. This week, Roseanne returns to television, 30 years after its October 18, 1988, debut on ABC.
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