‘The Conners’ Wasn’t Allowed to Use Clips of Roseanne Barr in the Finale

Her grave did make an appearance
‘The Conners’ Wasn’t Allowed to Use Clips of Roseanne Barr in the Finale

TV audiences said goodbye to the Conner family last night for the second time. While the series finale of The Conners didn’t involve any crazy twists that upended the entire reality of the series, à la the ending of the original Roseanne, it did include a touching moment in which John Goodman, as Dan Conner, broke the fourth wall to wish us, the audience, goodnight. 

Wait, does that mean that Dan knew we were watching him the whole time? Even when he was in the shower?

A big question going into the finale was whether or not the show would pay tribute to Roseanne Conner, and by extension, Roseanne Barr. Obviously Barr’s performance was the comedic keystone of the original series, as well as the controversial reboot, before she was ultimately fired for posting racist messages on social media

Even though the character was Poochied off of The Conners via an opioid overdose, Roseanne’s death was a major plot point in the seventh season, which found Dan filing a wrongful death suit against the drug manufacturer. And in the very last episode, the characters gathered around Roseanne Conner’s grave to pay their respects to the beloved dead matriarch played by the less-beloved, very much alive, comedian. 

In the moments before Goodman’s final line, heartstrings were already being tugged by the cast’s tearful goodbyes and a montage of clips from the original Roseanne, which illustrated just how long we’ve been following these characters. But despite the fact that Dan and his family had just visited her grave, there was no footage of Roseanne in this tribute to Roseanne.

Well, there’s a very good reason for that. Executive producer Dave Caplan revealed to The Independent that Roseanne Conner’s omission from the clip reel was actually “contractual.” Meaning that even if they had wanted to include archival clips of Roseanne in the finale, they had a legal arrangement with Barr preventing them from doing so.

Seemingly, this stems from a behind-the-scenes arrangement with Barr from back when The Conners was first greenlit. Executive producer Bruce Helford was quick to point out that their deal with Barr was also what ensured that the series could go on without her, which, apparently, she could have easily prevented. “She was very gracious in allowing us to continue the show because she had a say in that,” Helford explained. “When she realized it would be putting 300 people out of work when the initial reboot was canceled, she gracefully allowed us to continue without her.” 

Less graciously, Barr once publicly stated: “They shit on my contribution to television and the show itself.”

In terms of the episode’s clips, Helford said that it made more sense to focus on the non-Roseanne characters anyways. “This show was really about the lives of these other people in the family, the Conners, and we wanted to focus on them,” he noted.

Of course, the Conners they chose to focus on also didn’t include D.J., but that’s a whole other thing.

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