‘The Conners’ May Get A Bright Ending From A Dark Windfall

There are probably fans who mostly remember the original run of Roseanne for episodes about topics like Roseanne (played by the mononymous comic), her husband Dan (John Goodman) and her sister Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) smoking their old weed stash and getting paranoid, or about Becky (Alicia Goransen) loudly farting at school. Those fans might find The Conners jarring: Becky grapples with alcoholism, then has a baby with an undocumented immigrant who gets deported; Darlene (Sara Gilbert) tries to support her son Mark (Ames McNamara) when he gets punished at school for PDA with his boyfriend; Dan, still working, gets crushed by a vending machine — and all that is before COVID makes the family’s finances even more perilous. 

It can be tough to watch! But now, the premiere of the show’s seventh and final season seems like it might be setting up a series finale that falls somewhere between the realistic bleakness of its run thus far, and the inauthentic fantasy of the lottery arc that closed things out the first time.

Perhaps because there had been some doubt that there would be a seventh season, producers ended Season Six with most of the characters doing about as well as they, or we, could hope. Jackie has retired from running the family’s diner, handing it off to Darlene’s daughter Harris (Emma Kenney). Harris’ steps into adulthood go beyond her job: With Darlene’s help, she also moves out of Darlene’s house and into her first apartment. As Harris exits, Becky decides to change her plan to move out with her daughter Beverly Rose (Charlotte Sanchez); instead, Becky’s boyfriend Tyler (Sean Astin) moves in. Darlene’s husband Ben (Jay R. Ferguson) gets a generous insurance settlement following a fire at his family’s hardware store, and he decides to use it to buy a hardware industry trade magazine. The fire also meant the end of Dan’s employment at the store, but Ben’s decision to use part of the settlement to pay off Dan’s mortgage means Dan can join Jackie in retirement. 

Producers did leave themselves some plot threads to play out in the six-episode seventh season, as the premiere (which airs on ABC tomorrow night) reminds us. Darlene gets a promotion at her college cafeteria job that leaves her less exhausted in her off hours, but it comes just as Ben’s entire focus is on launching the magazine. Jackie’s adjustment to her retirement has been sufficiently uneasy for her to pitch herself to return to Lanford’s understaffed police force after a multi-decade absence. Mark had better hope she doesn’t get that job back, since she’s figured out that his amazingly lucrative new job isn’t coding for a Fortune 500 company: it’s illegal hacking, with the goal of saving up for his tuition at the University of Chicago. The premiere also introduces a new storyline: Jackie has found out the family could have standing to sue a pharmaceutical company for Roseanne’s opioid-overdose death.  

I’m not sure there’s a more efficient encapsulation of The Conners than that its most potentially hopeful story is derived from its foundational tragedy. But committing to realism has meant that wins for the titular Conners tend to have come at a cost — of the hardware store last season, to name one. Co-showrunner Bruce Helford has said of the titular family, “They will never win the lottery, and they will never be rich.” And while a share of a hypothetical class-action settlement that could range from a minimum of $3,500 to the mid-five figures (assuming it parallels the actual case against Purdue Pharmaceuticals) might not be much to a TV creator who’s seen multiple projects go into syndication, it could be a life-changing amount of money for the Conners. Dan’s reaction to Jackie’s suggestion of a lawsuit sends him spiraling back into grief, which elevates Goodman’s performance. Latter-day Dan can’t really be on par with Goodman’s justly acclaimed performance as Eli in The Righteous Gemstones, but in the Conners premiere, Goodman comes alive in a way we haven’t seen him do as Dan in years.

Jackie’s possible return to the police force could test the show’s commitment to realism, however. Though police departments actually are facing recruitment shortfalls, producers at The Conners could lose a significant percentage of its audience if it follows the typical copaganda playbook instead of portraying the most likely scenarios with (and attitudes toward) law enforcement from the characters we have come to know in the nearly 40 years since Roseanne premiered. The fact that the show has cast Metcalf’s real-life daughter Zoe Perry — who first appeared on Roseanne in utero — as Jackie’s main point of contact with the department would seem not to portend an ACAB narrative; then again, this show does like to zig when you’re expecting it to zag. I don’t think the show would give the family a legal settlement only for this new cop character to arrest Mark and require the Conners to spend it on his defense, but if any show ever were going to do that, this is the one.

Earlier seasons have already addressed both Ben and Darlene’s difficulty connecting sexually, and her platonic friendships crossing emotional lines, so I’m not convinced that going back over old ground is the best use of the limited time available in this short season, particularly when there’s new stories the show could be exploring with its youngest adults, Harris and Mark. (That said, there are so many characters to feature that I can’t be too exercised not to get a final farewell with DJ.) Still, the marvel of The Conners is that these characters are so well-drawn, precisely performed and sincerely beloved that the franchise not only survived its former star’s racist scandals but has thrived without her.

The Conner family is part of TV history: However it happens, and whatever quibbles we may have, it will be hard to say goodbye.