‘The Conners’ Is Running Out of Chances to Say ACAB

Anyone who has been watching Jackie Harris (Laurie Metcalf) since her character’s 1988 début on Roseanne probably could have predicted that, when she retired, it wasn’t going to take. Jackie has always seemed like someone who wakes up at 60 mph and spends the day trying to burn off all her nervous energy, so I, at least, wasn’t that surprised that after retiring in the sixth season of The Conners, she almost immediately tried to find a new way to spend her time productively. Considering Jackie’s played by a woman who will be 70 soon, returning to the police force isn’t necessarily the first suggestion I’d make for her. On the other hand, given the franchise’s tendency to portray Lanford cops as respectful and even apologetic as they carry out their duties, maybe Jackie’s justified in thinking the job could be relatively low-stress. The question is: Is that still the story The Conners wants to tell about policing right now?

Jackie’s first stint as a police officer started all the way back in Roseanne’s second season. Though Jackie and Roseanne (as herself) started the series working together at a local plastics factory, draconian quotas imposed by a new foreman (Fred Dalton Thompson) sparked a mass resignation, leaving both sisters to find new jobs. While Roseanne makes do with phone sales from home and sweeping floors at a beauty salon, Jackie decides to enter the police academy, hoping for a career that will provide job security, benefits and the possibility of advancement for someone, like herself, who hasn’t been to college. Her time on the force ends about a season later, when she falls down a flight of stairs pursuing a suspect and injures her back — possibly because she shot herself in the leg first, a new detail added on The Conners a while back and repeated in tonight’s episode. 

Deciding not to take a desk job, she leaves the force, moving on to other jobs. Jackie does lord her new status over her friends and family while she’s in uniform, but she’s only ever mooching for respect as someone who’s always been insecure in the family relative to Roseanne, not abusing her power in any serious way.

We’ve seen the police in the franchise from time to time, most memorably when Dan (John Goodman) is being arrested. In the Season Five Roseanne episode “Crime and Punishment,” Roseanne tells Dan that Jackie’s jumpy behavior and strange bruises are from her boyfriend Fisher (Matt Roth) physically assaulting her. Dan finds Fisher and beats him up; Fisher presses charges and cops come to the Conner house. 

Jay (Jeremy Roberts) knows Roseanne well enough to call her Rosie, and mentions that he made sure dispatch sent him over to handle it; he promises to stall Dan’s processing as long as he can. When his partner Glenn (Nick Corello) is a hardass about cuffing him and Jay tells him not to, Dan insists, rhetorically asking Jay, “If you get fired, who’s gonna fix my parking tickets?” 

Maybe it’s overstating things to say that Roseanne’s portrayal of spending a night in jail is that it’s a marginally less chill hang than the usual. Then again, the second episode of this two-parter closes with a fantasy sequence in which Dan and his cellmates cover “Jailhouse Rock” — so maybe not!

Dan maintains his nobility in The Conners with a Season Five episode called “Dating, Drinking and Grifter Logic.” After he argues (over beers) with Jackie’s husband Neville (Nat Faxon) about her lying to Neville to sneak $500 to Dan, Neville announces that he’s going to Build-a-Bear Workshop to, well, not drown his sorrows but stuff them? Dan yells at him not to drive, and when Neville ignores him, Dan smashes the passenger window of Neville’s car with a rock, hauls Neville out, and sits in the driver’s seat so Neville can’t. The noise attracts a cop (Jordan Hubbard), to whom Dan lies that of course Neville wasn’t trying to drive — and neither was Dan; he was just going to sit in the car and sober up. 

But since Dan is sitting in a vehicle with the keys in the ignition, it counts as a DUI, and the officer has to arrest him. Unlike Jay, this cop is definitely too young to have possibly known Dan and Roseanne from high school, but he’s still kindly enough to let Dan call Jackie to come pick Neville up before Dan goes to jail.

Maybe this is SOP in Lanford: When Darlene gets caught in Season Two’s “CPAPs, Hickeys and Biscuits” for texting while driving, the arresting officer lets her call her then-boyfriend Ben (Jay R. Ferguson) while she’s still in the car, after she apparently told the cop “You work for me” and insulted his weight. Ben wearily asks if he needs to come bail her out, but she breezily tells him not to waste the money: “Honestly, I could use the night off.” 

Jail seems to be the perfect destination for an elevated Lanford staycation.

Jackie is talking about re-joining the police department at what could be a pivotal time in Conner family history, as a member faces the possibility of charges a lot more serious than could be dealt with with three figures’ worth of bail: Mark (Ames McNamara) has joined a group of hackers to make tuition money. Jackie has already found out and confronted Mark in the Season Seven premiere, giving him a deadline to confess to Darlene, though Jackie ultimately didn’t have to make good on her threat. In this week’s episode, Darlene finds a Balenciaga bag in Mark’s knapsack and has all the logical questions about it; so Mark is already on high alert when Darlene complains that Jackie won’t stop blowing her phone up, assumes that’s what it’s about, and tells the truth. Darlene tells him he has to stop, on threat of her kicking him out of the house, and that plot line is left hanging as the episode ends.

Meanwhile, Jackie and Neville clash over her intention to revive her policing career — and his concerns about how dangerous it is are harder to press now that he’s working as a vet at a local zoo and specializing in the care of its internet-famous polar bear. Though no one thinks Jackie should do it, Neville backs down. Yay?

Jackie’s self-inflicted gunshot isn’t the only new detail The Conners has added to the story of Jackie’s police work: In the fourth season’s “Hot for Teacher and Writing A Wrong,” which revolves in part around Mark taking ADHD medicine that wasn’t prescribed to him, Jackie says part of the reason she retired rather than continue at a desk was that she “couldn’t handle watching promising young people go down the wrong path” — a position very much aligned with the show’s progressive stances on protecting trans people’s privacy at work, preserving access to controversial books in school libraries and committing immigration fraud for the right reasons. Taking a pro-cop position — even if the cops in question are, historically, exceptionally pleasant to deal with — would be a departure from what the franchise has been doing lately. The Overton window on ACAB has moved so far that it’s being used as the title of a new Netflix cop show and casually used in the headlines of mainstream movie reviews. As one of the last shows on TV that revolves around downwardly mobile characters, The Conners has a unique responsibility to portray policing as it is: a force acting in opposition to the working class.

But considering Jackie would be coming into the job handicapped by her age, if Mark continues refusing to hear reason, would she ever attempt to promote her career at his expense? It would be a stunning betrayal of the show’s family-first ethos, but why else write Jackie back on to the force? And is Metcalf trying to prepare us by saying the show’s “not going to have a big bow tied up with the Conners” when it ends? 

Will Jackie ultimately be a cop or a Conner? It doesn’t feel like she could be both.