This story contains plot details of Wednesday’s series finale of “The Conners.”
Nothing about the “Roseanne” reboot played out as expected. When ABC revived Roseanne Barr’s hit Midwestern working-class family sitcom in 2018, hoping to appeal to the “forgotten” voters who had elected Donald Trump as president, no one anticipated that its return would be
a ratings sensation
two decades after the original groundbreaking series ended, with about 25 million viewers tuning in to reunite with Roseanne Conner. Although network executives were certainly aware of Barr’s controversial past (on the show and in real life) and vitriolic social media posts, they didn’t know she would fire off
a racist tweet
two months later that was so offensive they had to immediately cancel the show.
With Barr no longer financially or creatively involved, the network
ordered
a spin-off, “The Conners.” To everyone’s surprise, including the producers, the show lasted seven seasons, wrapping up for good on Wednesday night with — true to form — a storyline throughout the final six episodes that no one saw coming.
The pilot in October 2018 opened on the Conners mourning the loss of Roseanne, whom the producers
decided to kill off
via an opioid overdose. She spent the “Roseanne” reboot with severe knee pain and in the penultimate episode, her husband Dan (John Goodman) found pill bottles all over the house. Roseanne confessed she was taking so much Vicodin because she assumed she could never afford surgery with a $3,000 deductible, and Dan responded with some bleak foreshadowing that if it was between her overdosing and him coming up with the money, he would find the money. Roseanne got the surgery, and the first episode of “The Conners” revealed she remained hooked on the pills that eventually caused her to stop breathing.
In a video interview with The Washington Post this week, executive producers Bruce Helford, Bruce Rasmussen and Dave Caplan said they never discussed whether Roseanne’s pill addiction would have continued had Barr stayed on the reboot, but the topic probably would have come up again — the show addressed the struggles of low-income families, including health care. They were inspired to dive back into the subject last summer after
the Supreme Court blocked
a Purdue Pharma bankruptcy plan and ruled that the owners, the Sackler family, would not be immune from opioid lawsuits.
So when Roseanne’s sister Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) announced in the Season 7 premiere in March that the family could sue a drug manufacturer for Roseanne’s death from opioids, it kicked off an arc leading to the show’s conclusion. Roseanne’s daughters (Sara Gilbert as Darlene, Lecy Goranson as Becky) were all for seeking retribution, especially if it could help with money — they were constantly one financial tragedy away from disaster. (“We could be, like, a
two-
tragedy family!” Darlene said with excitement.) At first, Dan had no desire to relive his grief over his wife’s death, and he assumed the company’s fancy lawyers would prevent any chance at compensation. After a lot of arguments, Dan agreed that Roseanne would have wanted him to try, and they hired a lawyer (Jane Lynch) who worked on contingency to sue the company.
“It gave us a great storyline to not just cry out for justice for their matriarch, but also for all those people who never got a chance to just yell at somebody about this damn thing,” Helford said. “Because working-class people, so many of them lost their family members to this.”
Rasmussen took on much of the research and did a deep dive into real-life opioid lawsuits, and was fascinated by the idea of putting a dollar amount on a person’s life. He said that Helford came up with the idea to have the lawsuit plot recur through the season, which allowed Dan and the family to deal with their emotions surrounding Roseanne — a natural way to pay tribute to the character. (Shortly after “The Conners” pilot, Barr
released
a statement that expressed regret that the show killed off her character, adding, “That it was done through an opioid overdose lent an unnecessary grim and morbid dimension to an otherwise happy family show.”)
“It felt like a poignant thing because John, you know, in a weird way is like the old gunslinger who hung up his six-shooter and doesn’t want to take it down again. He put the Roseanne thing behind him,” Caplan said. “And then to have to make that decision to open the wound back up and go through it all again just felt like wonderful drama for John Goodman to play.”
“And in wonderful drama, there is wonderful comedy, always,” Helford added. “I mean, also, when you have someone like John Goodman to play that, you’re not afraid of taking that on. But most sitcoms would not take on that stuff.”
Decades after “Roseanne” confronted such hot-button topics such as race, abortion, teen sex, sexual orientation and more, “The Conners” also did not hold back, bringing a comic touch even in moments of despair. (Though Roseanne’s clash with her family over her support of Trump was part of the reboot, “The Conners” final season did not tackle his return to the White House.) When Dan signed off on the lawsuit, his daughters drew him a cartoon to help him remember the timeline of Roseanne’s addiction — and included a drawing of her falling when she injured her knee, an incident where everyone was laughing so hard they didn’t even realize she was in pain. Rasmussen said one of the biggest laughs of the series was in “The Conners” pilot, when Dan stormed off with Roseanne’s secret stash of pills that Becky found, and Becky said regretfully, “That’s the only thing from Mom’s closet that I wanted.”
“Instead of looking for a funny idea and then writing a show around it, we find some dramatic reality and then we make a leap of faith that we’re going to be able to find the funny in it, and we usually do,” Caplan said.
“We’re very dark people,” Rasmussen said. “So it’s not hard for us to find it.”
In Wednesday’s finale, Dan’s fears about taking legal action came true during his deposition. The drug company’s lawyer smugly informed him that Roseanne was clearly responsible for her own death because she knew she was doing something potentially deadly by taking so many pills, and then the lawyer blamed Dan for not stopping his wife from abusing opioids. But Dan found peace when he was able to tell the lawyer to his face how he felt — that it was the company’s fault because they didn’t warn that taking the pills would turn her into an addict.
“Even if I took every penny you had, it wouldn’t be enough because you took the love of my life and you killed her. The same as you put a gun to her head, the only difference is you handed her the gun and told her it wasn’t loaded,” Dan said.
Dan was later stunned to learn that he would be receiving a check from the company, and the family gathered at Roseanne’s grave to open it together. They found out that for all his courage, and all the pain, he was awarded a grand total of … $700. All he could do was burst out laughing. “Well, we always wondered how much a Conner’s life is worth, and now we know,” he said. They used the money to order pizza and drink beer back at the house, where they gathered around Roseanne and Dan’s living room couch one final time before heading off to their respective homes.
The actors started crying during that scene as they said goodbye, and Goodman looked right at the camera and said goodnight. The reboot was another attempt at a better ending to “Roseanne,” because the creators were not satisfied with how the original show ended. In a way, it was always the job of “The Conners” to come along and fix the show’s legacy after the reboot imploded. The producers hope this brings satisfying closure to a show that had a truly unpredictable journey. As Dan told his family in the final scene, as long as they have each other, they can handle anything life throws at them. Rasmussen worried the line was too sappy, but it also seems fitting.
“The theme of show is the working class — which I believe is the nobility and the people who make the most sacrifice in this country — survive based on their humor and their ability to bond together and get everybody in the family to the finish line,” Helford said. “And that’s what the show has always been about.”
