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Life and Stuff: How Roseanne Changed TelevisionJune 6th, 2011 · admin · Movies and TV

Audrey Mardavich is watching all nine seasons of Roseanne. Whether she can make it through another opening credit harmonica/saxophone solo is debatable.

In Roseanne Barr’s recent article in New York Magazine, “And I Should Know,” she writes about the lack of change in the TV industry since her show debuted over 20 years ago. I decided that it might be a nice summer challenge to watch all nine seasons of Roseanne. It’s a billion degrees here in Texas, and if you’re going to spend a lot of time indoors, might as well do something productive!

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Roseanne started her career as a standup comedian in Colorado. She was later “discovered” at the Comedy Store in L.A. She writes in New York Magazine:

After my 1985 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, I was wooed by producers in Hollywood, who told me they wanted to turn my act into a sitcom. When Marcy Carsey—who co-owned Carsey-Werner with her production partner, Tom Werner (producers of The Cosby Show)—asked me to sign, I was impressed. I considered The Cosby Show to be some of the greatest and most revolutionary TV ever.

Marcy presented herself as a sister in arms. I was a cutting-edge comic, and she said she got that I wanted to do a realistic show about a strong mother who was not a victim of Patriarchal Consumerist Bullshit—in other words, the persona I had carefully crafted over eight previous years in dive clubs and biker bars: a fierce working-class Domestic Goddess. It was 1987, and it seemed people were primed and ready to watch a sitcom that didn’t have anything like the rosy glow of middle-class confidence and comfort, and didn’t try to fake it. ABC seemed to agree. They picked up Roseanne in 1988.

The “domestic goddess” persona from her stand-up routine takes full form in the character of Roseanne Connor. However, Roseanne is much more than a “domestic goddess.” She’s a full-time worker, mother, wife, sister and hilarious smart-ass. Roseanne’s commitment to bringing true-to-life scenarios into the show is clear even in the first episodes which deal with issues like family, marriage, gender roles, middle class work, unemployment and money problems.

In the first scene of the pilot, Roseanne flips the traditional family sitcom on its head when her husband Dan comes down in the morning to ask if there is coffee and Roseanne patronizingly asks him, “Dan, is their coffee every morning? In the fifteen years we’ve been married has there been one morning where there isn’t coffee?” From that point on, you know that the Connor family is not like other families portrayed on television, and more likely representative of your own.

Behind the scenes of the first season, Roseanne was in a battle for credit for her work on the show. She writes:

“It didn’t take long for me to get a taste of the staggering sexism and class bigotry that would make the first season of Roseanne god-awful. It was at the premiere party when I learned that my stories and ideas—and the ideas of my sister and my first husband, Bill—had been stolen. The pilot was screened, and I saw the opening credits for the first time, which included this: CREATED BY MATT WILLIAMS. I was devastated and felt so betrayed that I stood up and left the party. Not one person noticed.”

It is very refreshing to watch a television show with a cast of interesting, funny female characters. One of the funniest scenes is when Roseanne has to ask her boss Booker (George Clooney) for time off to go to her son’s parent-teacher conference. As Booker annoyingly explains the importance of teamwork, and how “all the players are equally important,” Roseanne (pretending to fall asleep, LOL) patronizingly (again) compares this scenario to a quilting bee, “Yeah, I got it, I got it, so it’s like a big ‘ol quiltin’ bee where all the barefoot women on the prairie get together and all stitch this one really incredible quilt and no one patch is any more important than any other patch? Well the woman sewing THIS patch has to get off an hour early today!”

It’s also refreshing to watch regular people wearing regular sweaters, rather than the glitzy, commercialized, tanned-boobed BS of “reality” and mainstream television.

Roseanne was a show written and directed by women who care about how women are presented in the media. As Roseanne said in a 1995 interview with Entertainment Weekly:

“There’s a real political point to make here, which is, nobody came to television or anywhere near the media with the idea that I came with, which is a pro-woman idea. Everything I do is from a commitment to feminism. And because I have faith in God, which nobody in the press can handle. When I realized the power that the press was giving to everything I did, just because I



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was a big, scary, fat woman and also a big, scary, fat, Jewish woman, I was, like, everything that fuckin’ everybody feared. I said, my God, I’m gonna be able to work it even more for women.”

And she did. Roseanne hit number one and was the most watched show from 1989 to 1990. In a time when television was dominated by male stars in shows like Family Ties (in which Michael J. Fox plays a young republican), and The Cosby Show ,starring Bill Cosby’s comic routine, Roseanne carved a place in mainstream television for women and working class families.

All nine seasons of Roseanne are streaming instantly on Netflix, and I highly recommend you watch at least a few episodes and remind yourself how Roseanne Barr pretty much single-handedly changed the television industry and won over the hearts of millions.

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