‘The Conners’ Wasn’t Allowed to Use the Original ‘Roseanne’ Couch

The Conners — aka Roseanne Minus Roseanne — will soon be returning for its seventh and final season. It will be hard to say goodbye to some of those characters (assuming that they won’t just be brought back for yet another reboot 20 years from now), but it will be really tough to say goodbye to that living room. 

For those of us who grew up with the original Roseanne, it was pretty wild to see the Conners’ house brought back to life for the 2018 revival, including, most importantly, that iconic couch.

But while it looks identical, the couch from the Roseanne reboot and The Conners isn’t really the original. While promoting the show six years ago, John Goodman claimed that they were forced to use a “replica” because the real couch is at the Smithsonian, and the famed institution wanted too much money for it. Roseanne Barr claimed that it wasn’t a huge loss because the original “smells just like butt.”

This wasn’t exactly true. The couch was never at the Smithsonian, it was in a warehouse, as part of a private collection of TV memorabilia that also includes Captain Kirk’s uniform and Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. Apparently the couch was stashed away after the original Roseanne wrapped up in 1997, and purchased years later by collector James Comisar. 

So when it came time to restart the Roseanne-verse, why didn’t they just use the original? Comisar claims that he was open to the idea, but had “strict stipulations” for how the people that made the couch famous in the first place could use it. According to Sara Gilbert, the restrictions were practically impossible to work around. “There were so many requirements for using the actual couch,” Gilbert explained. “It had to be insured. It had to come to set only on shoot days. You couldn’t eat or drink on it. There had to be somebody guarding it. There were all these costs and complications, and we were laughing because we used to spill stuff and eat Cheetos on that couch. It was funny to see someone being so precious about it.”

The show’s production designer, John Shaffner, claimed that the couch’s current owner also demanded that the couch be kept in a “temperature controlled environment.” So they ultimately “passed” and went to work on creating a new couch. 

Shaffner and his team bought two couches off of Craigslist, and cut the second one in half to modify it into an armchair. Then they covered the furniture with fabric “bought from a company that upholsters RVs.” If all that doesn’t sound painstaking enough, they “ended up painting out lines in the fabric in the sofa.” 

Which sure is a lot of effort to go to, purely in order to recreate a couch that still exists. 

You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).