by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. I
switched from MS-NBC to ABC for the first episode — the first two episodes,
actually, since they told a two-part story — of the bizarre reboot of Roseanne, the TV series built around Roseanne Barr
(who renamed herself Roseanne Arnold after she married Tom Arnold, then called
herself simply “Roseanne” after she and Arnold divorced, and is now Roseanne
Barr again) playing proletarian housewife and mom Roseanne Conner, with John
Goodman as her on-screen husband. The series ran nine seasons, from 1988 to
1997, and at its height it was one of the most popular shows on television,
rivaled only by The Cosby Show. I never watched it until just recently, when one of my home-care
clients would have it on while I worked, and I found it essentially The
Honeymooners with the
genders reversed, a clever show that was occasionally quite funny but nowhere
near as consistently amusing as its writers (or its laugh tracks) thought. It
was hailed in its time as bringing the working class back to TV, and so someone
at ABC and/or its original producing company, Carsey-Werner Productions,
thought it would be a good idea to bring it back in the Trump era even though
Roseanne’s real politics are quite at the opposite end from her character’s,
who proclaims early on in the reboot that she voted for Trump and is quite
proud of it. The real Roseanne Barr, says her imdb.com page, “is a spokeswoman for various pro-choice groups, has
asserted pro-choice views in publications such as The Advocate, and has appeared at benefits sponsored by
pro-choice organizations such as the Fund for a Feminist Majority. In several
episodes of Roseanne (1988) Roseanne Conner defends a woman’s right to
choose.” (I guess she won’t be doing that in the new version!)
This version of Roseanne not only reunites Roseanne Barr and John Goodman,
it also brings back the same actors who originally played her kids, Sara
Gilbert as Darlene and Alisa Goranson as Rebecca, though of course by now
they’re adults and their characters have kids of their own even though
financial reversals and marital breakups (a subject the real Roseanne should be
an expert on by now, since she’s been through three of them) have forced them
to move back in with their parents. The gimmick in the first episode is that
Rebecca has agreed to become a surrogate mother for a well-to-do woman who’s
offering her $50,000, not only to be a rent-a-womb but to use one of her own
eggs for in vitro fertilization, since
apparently the woman who’s hiring her is so reproductively dysfunctional she can’t use one of
her own. “Is she going to watch while her husband has sex with you?” Roseanne
asks her daughter in that peculiarly whiny, nasal voice she developed for this
character (her own voice, as revealed in the PBS series Pioneers of
Television, is several registers
lower and nowhere near as annoying). “They don’t do it that way!” Rebecca says.
Her big fears is that the parents-to-be will call the deal off if they find out
she’s 43 — she lied and said she was 10 years younger than she was — and
they’ve also wanted to meet her family, which means Becky wants to
de-proletarianize the house and in particular to hide all the photos of her mom
and dad so her employers don’t get the impression that she’s from a family
whose members genetically run towards large size.
The writer, Bruce Rasmussen,
occasionally comes up with some lines that are genuinely funny — at one point
Roseanne is rummaging through the garage and comes across a book manuscript
about her life, which apparently she attempted to sell in the old days and
which ended with the death of her husband (which was presumably the producers’
attempt to explain how John Goodman returned to the cast when the last episode
of Roseanne 1.0 ended with his death).
She mournfully regrets that she wasn’t able to get the thing published and
says, “It needed bondage and wizards waving wands!” Mostly, though, it’s meet
the new Roseanne, same as the old Roseanne except the leads are older and even less
attractive, either as bodies or as characters, and there are some odd attempts
to do All in the Family-style
political clashes, as when Roseanne meets her sister — or is it her
sister-in-law? Her kids call her
“aunt” but never make it quite clear which of their parents she’s a blood
relative of — who tearfully confesses that Roseanne’s relentless attacks on
Hillary Clinton’s honesty, trustworthiness and overall fitness for the
presidency led her to change her vote … to Jill Stein. (“Who’s that?” Roseanne
asks. “Some doctor,” is the reply. She was the Green Party candidate for
President and is blamed by some Democrats for drawing enough votes away from
Clinton to give Trump some key swing states, and hence an Electoral College
victory.)
For my money, by far the most interesting character in the new Roseanne is Mark (Ames McNamara), Roseanne’s nine-year-old
grandchild who wears his hair long and likes to dress in women’s clothing — the
first day of school in his new neighborhood he insists on going in a long,
flowing knit scarf and a pair of skin-tight, sequined girl’s pants, and the
second day he dresses in something that could either be a plaid skirt or a kilt
— which of course makes Our Heroine and her clueless husband Dan (John Goodman)
wonder about his sexual orientation and/or his gender identity, and leads Dan
to give him a pocket knife, which he offers to give to the school bully who
torments him at recess until he’s busted by school security and sent to the
principal’s office. I guess I can identify with the character, not only because
he has my name but because Roseanne’s advice to him is just what I ended up
doing — if the cool kids at school won’t befriend you, find your fellow misfits
and make friends with them (when I first saw the TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and they got to the “Island of Misfit Toys” scene,
I thought, “That’s me! That’s
where I belong!”). Mark’s plot line genuinely moved me in a show that
otherwise, aside from the nice blues harmonica used in place of the usual
bombastic orchestral score to signal changes of scene — a welcome touch from
the original show re-used here — the new Roseanne is pretty pointless television, one of those
retreads of something that (like the original Will & Grace) was well remembered but hardly as good as people
remembered it!
