ABC
By the end of its first season, Roseanne was the second most popular show on television. By season two, it hit number one, beating The Cosby Show by 200,000 viewers. The ABC blue collar sitcom would stay in the top-10 until season eight, when it dropped to #16. That’s when things got weird.
Roseanne was one of three shows I loved growing up, right there with The Simpsons and Seinfeld, but what separated it from those two was that it was the first comedy where I distinctly remember something feeling different. That something was season nine, a bizarre middle finger to convention that had the Conners, a family that went through as many low-paying jobs as Roseanne did ugly shirts, winning the Illinois State Lottery. The prize: $108 million. It made no sense at the time, and didn’t for the next 22 episodes, until the series finale. In case you’ve forgotten: the Conners becoming millionaires? Never happened. Everything we witnessed was Roseanne coping with the death of her husband, Dan, who we all thought survived his heart attack from a season prior. Also, Jackie’s gay and DJ turned into a serial killer, probably. Here’s the voiceover that plays over the scene:
My writing’s really what got me through the last year after Dan died. I mean at first I felt so betrayed as if he had left me for another women. When you’re a blue-collar woman and your husband dies it takes away your whole sense of security. So I began writing about having all the money in the world and I imagined myself going to spas and swanky New York parties just like the people on TV, where nobody has any real problems and everything’s solved within 30 minutes. I tried to imagine myself as Mary Richards, Jeannie, That Girl. But I was so angry I was more like a female Steven Segal wanting to fight the whole world. (Via)
TV shows and movies about writers writing are typically a painful, self-serving slog (and the rest of her speech should have been trimmed), but this one kind of works. Here’s a woman who was deeply, painfully in love with her husband who she’s been with since middle school, but in an instance, he’s gone. She responds to the tragedy by immersing herself in a fictional world, one where Dan’s alive and they’re rich and…OK, it still doesn’t make up for everything before it. Things were getting too real there.
A brief collection of the oddest scenes from season nine of Roseanne.