‘The Conners’ Bittersweet Finale Proves One Last Time That No Franchise Ever Portrayed Struggle Better

Warning: Contains spoilers about the two-part series finale of The Conners, which aired April 23rd.

Between Roseanne and its sequel/spin-off The Conners, there were well over 300 episodes in the Lanford-verse before the Season Seven premiere of The Conners last month. That already would have been a lot of old story to wrap up before the show’s producers started introducing new plotlines — and it all had to be dispensed with in just six 21-minute episodes. A wrongful-death lawsuit over Roseanne’s fatal overdose pre-Conners gave the abbreviated seventh season a dramatic through-line, and viewers hoped that we’d be seeing them off into a more comfortable (imaginary) future. But if the ending of The Conners hadn’t been bittersweet, it wouldn’t have been The Conners: no franchise has ever portrayed struggle better.

Dan (John Goodman) has spent most of the season feeling deeply ambivalent about the lawsuit, a suggestion from his sister-in-law Jackie (Laurie Metcalf). Seeking to profit from the death of his beloved wife has felt ugly. After agreeing to pursue it, Dan has had a hard time accessing the raw emotions a jury would need to see to find in his favor. On top of all that, Dan’s current wife Louise (Katey Sagal) — who has already felt overshadowed by Roseanne’s memory — has been suffering silently with all the talk of how irreplaceable Roseanne is, and having to sit in a deposition and watch Dan call Roseanne the love of his life. 

Dredging up the painful past doesn’t seem worth it for a settlement of what ends up being $700 — to say nothing of the avoidable loss of Roseanne herself. “Well, we always wondered what a Conner’s life was worth — now we know,” says Dan in the series finale, having gathered the whole family at Roseanne’s gravestone to see him open a check that’s probably what Becky (Alicia Goransen) will owe for the next one and a quarter payments on her fancy new truck. 

Infamously, the original final season of Roseanne found the family winning the lottery and spending a couple dozen episodes enjoying their new wealth; even if, canonically, the original finale made that a fantasy of Roseanne’s, we still watched it play out. That season ran from the fall of 1996 into the spring of 1997 — prosperous times that included Bill Clinton’s re-election, and predated the Lewinsky scandal. Back then, the Conners got to live a fairy tale. As weird as that was, for this working-class Midwestern family to get one in the 2025 we’re all currently experiencing would be much stranger. (At least Jane Lynch’s Jean, Dan’s lawyer, worked on contingency.)

But even if a full-on fairy tale isn’t in the cards for the Conners, they’re actually doing better, on the whole, than we’ve seen in years. Dan’s mortgage is finally paid off. Becky and Darlene (Sara Gilbert) don’t live in his house anymore; while Becky is currently rooming with Darlene and her husband Ben (Jay R. Ferguson) at their house, her great new job could allow her and her boyfriend Tyler (Sean Astin) to get their own place sooner than they ever imagined. Darlene’s daughter Harris (Emma Kenney) getting a boyfriend in Riley (Stony Blyden) after meeting him in episode four of six this season might feel like an afterthought, but at least he’s not a trustafarian “activist” or a single father trying to marry her into mothering his child like some of her exes; more importantly, Harris is apparently doing well as the new manager of the Lanford Lunch Box. Mark’s (Ames McNamara) participation in an illegal hacking group — and the threat that Jackie would turn him in, once she figured it out — has been hanging over the season; but as soon as literally everyone has found out what was going on, Jackie conveniently finds him a job at a legitimate cybersecurity firm and no longer needs to save money for college because he doesn’t want to attend anymore. Darlene’s tearful argument that, by going straight into a stable, highly paid job, he’ll miss out on finding himself in college? Feels even more Gen-X vintage than the “MEAT STINKS” T-shirt we see her wearing later.  

Metcalf warned fans last month that the series finale wasn’t “going to have a big bow tied up,” and that’s certainly true. Her own character, for example, has spent most of the final season talking about re-joining the Lanford police force decades after a then-career-ending back injury. Largely, this seems to have been so that Metcalf could show off her still-impressive slapstick chops as Jackie has tried to prepare for the physical exam. Jackie shows up to Roseanne’s gravesite in her uniform, but helping Mark get the legitimate job has already saved her, as a sworn officer of the law, from having to turn in her grand-nephew; and returning to the police department with minutes to go in the series finale means the show doesn’t have to reckon with what she would be getting out of the job in the current political climate.

Also left unfinished: the state of Darlene’s marriage. Since meeting fellow Lobo Lounge barfly Chad (Seth Green) in the season’s second episode, she’s been pretty obviously using him to supply the attention she hasn’t been getting from Ben while he prepares to launch a new magazine for the hardware trade. Becky’s concern finally tipping far enough over for her to talk to Ben about it coincides with Chad finally shooting his shot and suggesting a dinner date to an oblivious Darlene, who has apparently thought they were just friends and not recognized that they’ve been having an emotional affair. 

Assisted by Becky’s warning, Ben apologizes to Darlene for neglecting her and being a bad partner; Darlene tells him he isn’t, but he is, and this isn’t the first time the two of them have had problems because he’s taken her for granted. At the grave, Darlene tells Roseanne she’s found love with someone “just like dad.” With all due respect to the great Jay R. Ferguson, who will always have a place in my heart for his performance as Stan in Mad Men, this is vastly overstating things, and any future installment of the franchise (come on, you know they’re going to try it SOMEtime) has to acknowledge this pattern in Darlene and Ben’s relationship.

Most bizarrely: among the graveside announcements to the departed Roseanne is Jackie’s. “I’m really happy now,” she assures her late sister. “I know you didn’t think that that was possible, but I figured it out. Oh, and by the way, I have no idea where our mother is.” 

I’ll confess I had tried to block out the show’s send-off of Jackie and Roseanne’s mother Beverly (Estelle Parsons), so if you’re like me, here’s a reminder. Beverly had grown increasingly hard to talk to and manage after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, but had enjoyed some moments of clarity thanks to her enrollment in a dementia drug trial. After she and Jackie made peace with their contentious past, Beverly announced she was going to get on a train and take off for parts unknown by herself, and we have not seen her since. At the time, Jackie told her family she was tracking Beverly’s phone, but I guess that went out the window — maybe literally — and now a person who may not be responsible enough to keep track of her ID or access to a bank account could possibly be anywhere. 

Parsons is now 97, so even if we got a surprise eighth season this fall I wouldn’t expect to see her again, but the idea that it’s preferable for fans to think Bev’s daughter would just abandon her to an uncertain fate than for producers to have ended the actor’s run by giving her character a natural death will never make sense to me.

Even if all the loose ends had been tied up (or cauterized), no ending could have been entirely perfect. But this one is probably as close as we could have hoped. Dan was right in the first place: No amount of money could have brought Roseanne back, but at least he got enough to buy pizza and beer for the family to eat together while gently sniping at each other, the way we’ve loved to see them do for almost 40 years. 

The Conners never reached the heights of the original show in its best years — and that includes that one weird revival season in 2018, before Roseanne got herself fired — but it told stories no other show even tried to take on. We’re all going to be the poorer for its absence in the years ahead.