There’s No Zombie Roseanne in ‘The Conners’ Finale, Producers Claim
The Roseanne-verse finally comes to an end this week with the series finale of The Conners. While we don’t know exactly what will happen, it will no doubt focus on the titular family’s wrongful death lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company responsible for making the opioids that Roseanne Conner overdosed on.
It’s kind of funny that the show has been able to wring so much drama out of a plot point that was only introduced because Roseanne Barr was fired from Roseanne. That’s like if Two and a Half Men ended with a dramatic court case involving the manufacturers of the piano that fell on Charlie Sheen.
What should we expect from the finale of The Conners? According to executive producer Bruce Helford, we should expect the unexpected. “There’s something that happens in the final episode that I don’t think has ever happened on broadcast television,” Helford told TV Insider. Does this mean that the episode will feature Dick Van Dyke water skiing in the nude across a swimming pool filled with Arby’s sauce? According to the producer, this network TV first is “going to be really emotional.”
As Men’s Journal pointed out, Sara Gilbert said something similar during a recent interview, telling Good Morning America that “there’s also something we do at the end that I haven’t really seen that I can recall on another show. So I think that will be fun for people to see.”
Fans may be a bit nervous about this considering that the last time a TV show about the Conner family aired a series finale, things got pretty wacky. In the Roseanne finale’s closing moments, it’s revealed that much of the show was just Roseanne Conner’s creative writing project. In “reality” nobody won the lottery, Dan was dead, Jackie was a lesbian and Roseanne decided to swap her daughters’ spouses around for some creepy reason.
But when the show was rebooted in 2018, Dan was suddenly alive again. Unfortunately, Jackie’s son Andy and Roseanne’s son Jerry were banished to the abyss of non-existence, never to be mentioned ever again.
Could this mean that something similar will happen at the end of The Conners? Is it possible that Roseanne Conner has been writing a sequel to her old project this whole time, and decided to kill off her own character?
In a recent interview with The Wrap, Helford confirmed that there would be no zombie-like twists in the finale. “We aren’t bringing anybody back from the dead,” the producer said. Although he refused to 100 percent confirm that Roseanne’s ghost wouldn't make an appearance.
That too seems unlikely. After all, Barr has accused Gilbert of stabbing her in the back, and once claimed that the show’s writers actually wish her physical harm. Of course, the show could include a Roseanne cameo from beyond the grave without Barr if the Conner family decides to dust off the Ouija board that they canonically own.
Then again, maybe the finale will just avoid the subject of necromancy altogether.