This happened a couple of weeks ago now but it was so disappointing I had to let the fumes dissipate first. I’m talking about that final episode of The Conners (which aired April 23 on ABC and CTV. Stream it on their digital platforms).
Here was the only reboot I can think of to last seven seasons and 112 episodes. It followed ten seasons of one of the top-rated sitcoms of the late ’80s and ’90s, Roseanne. ABC ordered a final six-episode season of The Conners and it was, without question, the weakest part of the entire two-series epic. Storylines seemed thrown together around whichever cast members were available that week.
This has always been a soap opera with laughs about a blue collar family. Loyal viewers watched John Goodman and Laurie Metchalf age from their thirties to their sixties (Metcalf is 69) and seventies (Goodman is 72). If you watched it all through the decades, you probably have an unusually strong attachment to this TV family.
Much of this season tried to deal with the rather grim elephant in the room — how to wrap up a series where the original star’s character was killed off rather unceremoniously after Barr was dis-Barred for unacceptable tweets. When the series was resurrected as “The Conners” after the first very successful reboot season (Roseanne returned as the No. 3 overall series in 2018), viewers learned that Barr’s character has died of an opioid overdose. She was apparently using the drug to deal with pain from surgery.
As grim as that was for a sitcom, the overdose storyline was revisited in the final season as a possible way to tidy up the family’s chronic near-poverty problem. Jackie (Metcalf seizes upon an opening for families to sue Big Pharma for drug-induced demise.
This is at first a no-go for Roseanne’s widower Dan (Goodman). Jackie and his grown children, Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and Becky (Lecy Goranson) and other family members eventually change his mind.
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It is all resolved in the series finale and — spoiler alert — the Conners once again get screwed. The pharmaceutical companies lawyers seize upon Dan’s truthful and heartfelt testimony to find a sneaky way out of any real responsibility. This is revealed as the family stand at Roseanne’s gravesite where Dan reads the court outcome he should have read earlier.
That grim upon grim moment leads to some awkward “goodbye mom” soliloquies from the principal cast members. The only thing that could have saved this ending was to have Roseanne’s ghost rise from the dead and allow Barr to give them all hell for laying this giant egg on her grave site.
Even before this dumb ending, however, viewers were left with several questions. Couldn’t they have brought Michael Fishman — Dan and Roseanne’s son D.J. who was ditched after Season 5 of The Conners — back for one last hello and goodbye? Where was Ames McNamara, Darlene’s lanky son who was not in this finale after several Season 7 episodes showing him trying to hack his way into university?
And why did the writers spin this odd story about what seemed like the end of Darlene and her husband Ben’s (Jay R. Ferguson) marriage? This red herring never made sense, with Ben seemingly so hell bent on creating a print publication (Hardware Magazine??) that he did not live or sleep with his wife — even though the new office was just down the street? Then there were all those chemistry-free Season 7 scenes with Seth Green as Darlene’s new bar buddy, set up, it seemed, to lead to a spinoff series?
This reaching for any possible idea to chew up episodes had already poisoned the series. Season after season, Darlene or Becky would lose and land jobs for no other reason than to show that this family was desperate and on the verge of homelessness — yet they were still able to buy and refinish a second residence for the forty-something offspring.
The addition of Katie Sagal a few seasons back on The Conners never seemed like a logical fit or lived up to its potential. She’s some sort of hell-raiser rock star, touring at times, then back washing dishes in the Conner kitchen. Even Al Bundy would have objected on her behalf.
Another whopper was the storyline where Darlene’s grown daughter Harris (Emma Kenney) steps up as the owner of Jackie’s lunch box restaurant. Prior to that there was little evidence she could even make her own lunch.
That the series tilted more and more executive producer Gilbert’s character’s way also ground things down on The Conners. Less of Gilbert’s Darlene, more of Gorenson’s Becky, would have been very welcome at our house.
Jackie gets in on the hysteria at the end with this Quixotic dream of being rehired as a police officer. The part of this that I liked: scenes opposite her real life daughter Zoe Perry (from Young Sheldon) as a young, skeptical cop were a nice touch. Wire-y Jackie trains hard and, surprisingly at the end, makes it, so there is a nice moment of anybody can overcome anything I guess. Maybe Jackie can arrest all the Season 7 writers, that would be a real sign of justice.
At the end, you had Goodman, home alone on that tired old couch, saying goodbye to the viewers. It was a turn out the lights moment a bit reminiscent of the end of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It is a long, long way to that Tipperary, however. The Conners survived COVID, writers and actors strikes and the firing of its original star for this?
How should it have ended? Dan and Jackie should have been rewarded by the rest of the family with jackets made out of that blanket that hung over that couch. When Dan said goodbye and turned out the lights, Roseanne should have snuck back into the darkened living room, found the check for $700 from the drug company on the coffee table, grabbed it and ran off into the studio audience, cackling all the way. The end.
