The ‘Roseanne’ Reboot: Triumph Of The Shills

I promised myself two things: that I wouldn’t watch the reboot of the sitcom Roseanne and that I wouldn’t write a think piece about it. I have broken both promises. I am a bad person.

I loved the original run of Roseanne. I grew up watching ’80s sitcoms that were either about cheerful upper-middle class families living in mansions or orphans adopted by very wealthy white men. There were also action shows about punching, but that is an entirely different genre.

The pop culture of the Reagan years taught the inherently dishonest lesson that wealthy people are happy and the best case scenario for those of us not manor born or connected enough to game the stock market was to be adopted by a wealthy person.

You see, there was a time Hollywood was an accomplice of power, hawking the American Dream with a 100% money back guarantee.

Then there was Roseanne, a show that premiered at the dawn of George H.W. Bush’s presidency. I find it fascinating that history has swallowed the story of a President, the heir of the Great Communicator himself and the victorious wartime commander-in-chief with a national approval rating approaching 90%, losing a shock election to a relative nobody, the philandering governor of a backwater state.

But Roseanne was very much a product of a recession that had been percolating for years. Her show was very much a product of the ’90s, those years between the end of the Cold War and the War on Terror when America was the apex predator of nations.

The reason I loved the original Roseanne was simple: it was a show with the kind of couch my family owned. Old, beat-up, ready for the thrift store. But, even more importantly, it was a mass-media portrayal of a family struggling with unemployment, bills, and mental health issues but was still funny, and smart, and charming. The family unit—however you define family—can exist, and thrive, outside of the capitalist rat race. Their humanity was not defined by money, even if money was a near constant conflict.

The original Roseanne neither romanticized nor shamed being broke. It just told the same story, week after week, that you are not your paycheck. It was a much needed antidote to the previous “greed is good” years.

And, now, twenty years later, we’re revisiting the Conners. For a nation that so thoroughly rejected one Clinton, it is an irony that so many want to return to the years when the other Clinton was president.

But I was happy to see the original Roseanne comedy dream team back together. The Roseanne reboot is expertly assembled (and very savvy) counter-programming to the toxic, post-apocalyptic Thunderdome of partisan chainsaw fighting we see on the news all day, every day. So any cultural space that asks for a truce is welcome. All partisan combat and no play makes Jackie a dull girl.

With this reboot, Roseanne Barr has reinvented herself as a Donald Trump collaborator; however, one selling a fairy tale that begins “Once upon a time, there were Trump supporters who just wanted to vote for someone who promised jobs and to shake up a status quo that was, increasingly, mutating into something unrecognizable.”

This is a half-fiction: I do not believe that support for a politician means you agree with 100% of what they say or do. That is a ridiculous position that is poisoning our political discourse. The hunt for purity is, ultimately, corrupting.

But the Roseanne reboot tries to give a soft rewrite to history and makes pains to gently condescend to Trump supporters. I’m not saying I didn’t laugh during the first two episodes—I absolutely did because when that much raw talent demands you laugh, you laugh—but I had to ignore that John Goodman‘s Dan Conner is the sort of contractor that Donald Trump spent decades screwing over.

As a joyful critic of Trump, I found Roseanne’s sister, played wonderfully by Laurie Metcalf, a hoot. Her elastic performance as an insufferable Hillary-loving clown was informative, and it is wise for the anti-Trump set behold this grotesquerie. But it is too bad there was no satirical reflection of the Trump supporter, specifically those frothing red hat-wearing fans at Trump pep rallies who viciously cheered his racist jokes, applauded threats to his opponent, or punched protestors.

I suppose human beings are complicated. For this reboot to really sing it would have to further explore the contradictions baked into our country. The very basic contradiction being how a country that says “all men are created equal” goes to such lengths to deny equality to so many? Or, can a Trump supporter like tax cuts and, also, dislike a increasingly warlike foreign policy or a leader with no moral center? Did Bill Clinton’s base ever really wrestle with these contradictions, or did they just rationalize? There is no time like the present.

I am not surprised by this reboot, nor its success. Roseanne Barr is a celebrity, like the President, and it is yet another irony that a nation born rebelling against royalty who one day just create their own. But it’s not like she, nor the President, have spent the last two decades on the phone with their credit card company because sometimes you have to buy junior’s school supplies on plastic.

They’re just a couple of salespeople peddling a paint job. I am not interested in being upsold. But maybe you are?

Much has been made, of course, of the reboot’s ratings. It was such a hit that the President took time out of his busy schedule of watching cable news to call to congratulate Roseanne, as if she were a head of state. Eighteen million people tuned in, which is a yuge number these days. But I was not one of them. I don’t watch network television. I don’t have cable. I stream my entertainment. I purchased the first two episodes and they were commercial free. Who tuned into ABC at 8pm (7 central!) to watch the resurrection of a show cancelled in 1997? I don’t think it was the future.

John DeVore is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, the Paris of Long Island. Follow him on Twitter @JohnDeVore.

Watch Roseanne on Hulu