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Most sitcoms are built around one strong personality. That’s obviously true of shows where the lead’s name is the title (The Bob Newhart Show, Ellen) and it’s also true of shows you consider ensembles (Amy Poehler was the lead of Parks & Recreation, Tim Allen is the lead of Last Man Standing). So when all that weight is on one person, it makes losing that one person potentially disastrous.
That’s just what happened earlier this year when Roseanne Barr got in a whole lot of trouble for tweeting racist and incendiary remarks. ABC cancelled the Roseanne revival on the very day it began pre-production on its second season. Faced with a massive hole in its fall schedule (Roseanne was the second-biggest scripted show last season after This Is Us) and a lot of out of work writers and crew members, ABC negotiated a deal to cut Barr out of the picture completely while spinning off the rest of the characters into a new show. This October we’ll find out what Roseanne without Roseanne, a new show titled The Conners, looks like.
Roseanne losing its titular lead would have been shocking even if the events surrounding the change didn’t involve so much racism. But believe it or not, this isn’t the first time a show has lost its lead character. Shows have killed off core characters in the past–perhaps most notably on the ’80s family sitcom Valerie.
Like Roseanne, Valerie was named after its lead actress Valerie Harper. Harper rose to sitcom superstardom in the ’70s playing Rhoda on The Mary Tyler Moore Show before being spun off into her own successful series, Rhoda. Valerie was Harper’s TV comeback, and the show also starred a young Jason Bateman. And also like Roseanne, Harper would find herself written out of the show (although for drastically different reasons!). Just like Roseanne is turning into The Conners, Valerie turned into The Hogan Family.
So what happened to Valerie? The show debuted as a midseason replacement in March 1986 to okay ratings (#24 for the season, not bad, not great) and solid reviews. Still, the ratings and response were good enough that Harper figured she was in a position to get a raise and a larger cut of the syndication deal. NBC disagreed and contract negotiations became heated and, much to the network’s dismay, public. This made NBC programming chief Brandon Tartikoff angry, and he suggested replacing Harper with Broadway performer Sandy Duncan, who had just signed a contract with the network. And, well, that’s what they did.
A few weeks into production on Season 3, when tensions hadn’t let up and Harper was still holding out for a raise (she wasn’t even on set at this point), Valerie was fired from Valerie and Sandy Duncan was brought on to play Valerie’s sister-in-law. It was revealed that Valerie Hogan was killed in a car accident (!) in-between seasons, and Sandy Hogan moved in to help her brother take care of the kids. The show changed its name to Valerie’s Family (the absolute shade of keeping your ex-star’s name in the title after firing her!) for Season 3, and then switched to The Hogan Family for Seasons 4-6.
So, two very different reasons for a shake-up: Barr was fired for spreading dangerous rumors and racist lies on Twitter, and Harper was fired for holding out for a raise (one she probably deserved as the lead of a show, especially knowing that the gender pay gap is real). One more difference: while Barr severed all financial ties to The Conners, Harper ended up getting paid. She sued the production company for breach of contract, and a jury awarded her $1.4 million and 12.5 percent of the show’s profits.
Controversy aside, The Hogan Family ended up having the kind of success that you know The Conners hopes to emulate. The show ran for four more seasons with its new lead and kept consistent ratings with its Harper years for three. We don’t yet know how The Conners will fare following its controversial creation. If it goes the Valerie/Hogan Family route, it could actually end up with a decent run in primetime.
