‘The Conners’ Is So Good It’ll Make You Forget About Roseanne

Roseanne was never going to work again with Roseanne Barr. The revival season was a wild runaway ratings success for ABC, sure, but that success came at the sacrifice of what made the original show so rich. The new Roseanne Conner was unrecognizable, a once proudly feminist freethinker that was conned into voting against her family’s best interests (not that the show wanted to get into that), and a survivor of parental abuse that went from vowing to never strike her kids to championing spanking a teenager. It felt like the Roseanne revival was written by people working from glancing at Wiki summaries of old episodes; the characters were all there, but their personalities had been edited by randos.

Now, in the kind of scientific sitcom experiment that we practically never see conducted, we get to witness whether or not it really was Barr that made the revival feel so off. The Conners is, for all intents and purposes, Season 2 of the Roseanne revival, except with the title character plucked out (and as per an embargo agreement, you’re not going to find out anything about Roseanne Conner’s fate in this review). The creators are the same (barring Barr) and the cast is the same, with the addition of Maya Lynne Robinson as DJ’s wife, back in Lanford after a tour of duty in Afghanistan. One thing’s been changed, so what does that do to the show?

It makes it better.

The Conners has Roseanne’s ethos without having Roseanne’s ethos. With Barr removed from the show and her live-tweeting conspiracy theories about gun violence survivors removed from the back of our minds, there is an ease and lightness to The Conners that harkens back to the original series’ heyday. The artificiality, the nonstop winking towards “real America” at the cost of real characters and real conversations, has been excised from the show. Barr was, without a doubt, holding the revival back.

The big question is, “What is Roseanne without Roseanne?” You don’t really get the answer in the pilot episode, which grapples with the spinoff’s status quo and the unspoilable incident I really cannot get into in any way. Put it this way: Roseanne’s presence is still very much felt in The Conners‘ pilot. But the second episode screened for the press, November’s “Tangled Up In Blue,” provided a look at what The Conners will become once it stands on its own feet–specifically the feet of John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, and Sara Gilbert. [UPDATE: “Tangled Up In Blue” will now air on ABC on 10/23]

Barr was not a performer. She was a stand-up, one with a forceful personality that served her well on television while she figured out how to deliver lines. Barr became a solid actress over the course of Roseanne; she won an Emmy, after all. But 20 years away from the soundstage left her rusty–and that did not serve the revival well, especially considering how in lockstep Roseanne Conner was with Roseanne Barr. While Gilbert got plenty to do on the revival, Metcalf and Goodman–legit powerhouse performers in their own right post-Roseanne–were relegated to glorified weekly cameos. The Conners lets them take control in a way they’ve never been allowed to, and it works. It really works.

I know it works because that pilot episode, the one all about the plot point I can’t write about, is actually funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. And it works because, The Conners points out in a knowing joke, “Laughing in inappropriate moments is what mom taught us to do.” Laughs come from a rudderless Jackie, struggling to put her much talked about life coach skills to work reorganizing the Conner kitchen (where does one put corncob holders?). Laughs come from Darlene and DJ’s wife Gina talking about religion (Darlene says the Conners have already “reserved a cabana in Hell”). Becky (Lecy Goranson) nearly steals the whole episode with a couple of zingers that floored me, one that is definitely embargoed.

But, just like the Roseanne of old, the first episode also knows how to wrench despair from certain moments, leaving it hanging there on stage between the actors and the audience. Goodman in particular gets to do some silent acting that, while brief, is as visceral as it gets. This all reminds me of just how good Roseanne used to be, and it makes me glad that The Conners is operating at that level.

It’s actually crazy that The Conners feels more like Roseanne without Barr, but that’s actually a credit… to Barr. She, along with the show’s original producers, wisely put together a strong ensemble and Barr was not afraid to let them shine a lot. These characters and performers have grown so much over 30 years that they can now carry this show on their own. Never is this more evident than in the episode from later in the season, an episode that features the return of David (Johnny Galecki) and his new partner Blue (Juliette Lewis).

The episode puts Darlene and Becky front-and-center, and both Gilbert and Goranson are more than game. Gilbert is a more than worthy heir for Barr as the show’s snarker-in-chief; she nails every single joke with an ease and honestly that is frankly refreshing compared to the slight hamminess that permeates every other multi-cam sitcom on air. The real surprise, though, is Goranson, who more or less stepped completely away from acting for the decades between Roseanne’s finale and revival. After getting back in the swing of things last season, Goranson has turned Becky into–oddly enough–The Conners‘ secret comedy weapon.

But really, the reason to watch The Conners–okay, the reason to watch The Conners is no doubt the WTF-ness of its creation, but the reason to stick with The Conners is because it puts John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf on our TVs again. Metcalf is totally all-in as Jackie after spending the revival with what felt like an eye towards the exit. There’s a line of hers in the latter episode, a compliment meant to psyche Darlene up to ask out a guy: “You’re one of the few educated, diabetes-free women in Lanford!” Metcalf is a treasure.

Goodman once again feels like the Dan of yesterday, one that’s a manly-man on the outside but really a big ol’ softie. This is evident in his scenes with his grandson Mark (Ames McNamara), who asks Dan to help him decide which classmate of his he likes more. Oh–and both of those classmates are boys. Yes, The Conners is actually giving us elementary-school LGBTQ representation, in a way handled with heart and humor.

And that’s my main takeaway from these two episodes of The Conners. This isn’t a show that’s about capital “P” Politics, but it is a show about the serious issues that face Americans. The revival got swept up in namedropping hot-button topics it didn’t really want to address; The Conners actually talks about these issues–health insurance, teen sex, alcoholism, coming out–with character-driven conversations that don’t feel like they were originally tweets meant to “own the libs.” It took some truly extreme circumstances (Roseanne getting kudos from the president and then getting fired for tweeting racist dog whistles and conspiracy theories is truly stranger than anything from Season 9), but all that controversy and scrambling has resulted in something truly worth watching and, more importantly, funny.

Roseanne the person might not be proud, but Roseanne the show would be.

Where to stream The Conners