Today in TV History: ‘Roseanne’ Got High in the Bathroom

, some other Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone. 

IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: October 5, 1993

PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Roseanne, “A Stash From the Past” (Season 6, Episode 4). [Watch on Amazon Video.]

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Mainstream TV and movies don’t tend to deal with marijuana all that well. Back in the day, weed was treated as this scarily hard drug, especially on TV’s “very special episodes,” and that all seems quaint at best embarrassing at worst. But even now that we’ve advanced into the post-Apatow era of prevalent weed humor, most shows are still pretty bad at it. The jokes are all pretty tired at this point: young characters getting baked, increasingly bizarre snacking, and worst of all, the hoary “old people smoking pot” trope, where the characters you’d never expect to get high do (often by accident) and act all wacky. We’ve seen it. It’s over. Please stop.

In a sea of witless weed jokes, though, Roseanne did it the best, and it’s been over twenty years and that’s still the case. When Roseanne and Dan find a stash of weed in the house, they assume it belongs to David (who at this point was living in their house while Darlene was away at college). After a round of sitcommy misunderstandings, though, they realize that it’s actually their weed, from a long time ago. So, haha, mystery solved, episode over. OR IS IT? Please appreciate the silly little devil-bunny-hop Dan does as he scrambles to lock the front door, paired with Roseanne’s wide-eyed fit of laughter that they’re actually going to smoke up.

Also of interest: Laurie Metcalf is obviously pregnant in this episode. She enters the one scene carrying a GIANT comforter for no real reason, and then keeps holding it in the scene long after the point where it would make sense to put it down.
Then in the bathroom scene, she’s blocked inside the tub (and clutching that damn blanket and her ganja to her chest), so you can’t see her belly there either. The Jackie character doesn’t get pregnant until the next episode, though, but it’s tough to remember that when watching the show in reruns, so it always seems so odd that this visibly pregnant woman would be getting massively high on a network sitcom.

ANYWAY, that bathroom scene is one of the funniest scenes in all of sitcom history, as far as I’m concerned. By the time it gets to the Jackie reveal, and “Is this the sink? Am I shrinking?” I’m just about dying (the studio audience is too), and that’s not even getting into Roseanne plaguing Dan with imaginary birds. 

[You can watch the “A Stash from the Past” episode of Roseanne on Amazon Instant Video]

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Joe Reid (@joereid) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can find him leaving flowers for Mrs. Landingham at the corner of 18th and Potomac.

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