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If you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu as we prepare to say goodbye to the Conner family, it’s not a surprise given we’ve been here before more than once.
The first time was in 1997 when “Roseanne,” the situation comedy that introduced us to the tight-knit but combative working class family from Lanford, Ill., came to a close after nine seasons. It was centered around comedian Roseanne Barr, who starred as the sardonic, tough-loving Conner matriarch, and was a huge hit for ABC, ranking in TV’s top 5 for its first six seasons, even landing at No. 1 for its second season (narrowly beating out then-ratings champ “The Cosby Show”).
Twenty-one years later, in March 2018, “Roseanne” came roaring back to ABC with a buzzy revival (technically its 10th season) that saw the original cast of Barr, John Goodman (Dan), Sara Gilbert (Darlene), Lecy Goranson (Becky), Michael Fishman (D.J.) and Laurie Metcalf (Jackie) returning. With a gargantuan reception of 27.3 million viewers for its two-episode premiere, it was no surprise that ABC renewed the show for an 11th season three days later. However, in a twist few saw coming, Barr cut that renewal short after she posted a racist tweet that resulted in the network swiftly canceling the show. It seemed as though another goodbye to the Conners had unceremoniously taken place.
“There was an odd conversation that I had with Channing Dungey [then-President of ABC Entertainment Group],” recalls executive producer Bruce Helford. “She’s saying, ‘I’m so sorry, we obviously can’t continue with what happened.’ I said, ‘Boy, aren’t we sorry we didn’t name the show ‘Darlene’? She said, ‘Let’s talk later.’”
But soon after, Helford and fellow executive producers Bruce Rasmussen and Dave Caplan got the green light to work on “The Conners,” which premiered on Oct. 16, 2018. “It’s not like we pulled a rabbit out of our hat,” Rasmussen says. “You had the most amazing cast in the world, so you took one person out who is a troublemaker to begin with. I’m just gonna say it.”
The morning of May 29 was already expected to be a critical point in the timeline of ABC’s revival of “Roseanne.”
Like “Roseanne,” the spin-off focused on the same family, living in the same Lanford home and experiencing the same working-class existence, except they were also dealing with the off-camera death of Roseanne, who died of an opioid overdose. While Barr was no longer a part of the series, the producers wisely didn’t erase Roseanne the character entirely from the show and kept her memory very much alive through the Conners.
“We decided to track all the other characters and how their lives would change without the matriarch in the middle,” Caplan explains. “It took a little bit of creative discussion to figure it out and then cross our fingers and hope that people would respond to it. Luckily, they did.”
For ABC, “The Conners” gave the network a chance to continue a story that began in 1988. “From watching Becky and Darlene grow from children of the ’80s to becoming parents themselves — navigating careers, family and everything in between — we’ve seen the Conners evolve through the years,” says Simran Sethi, who is president of scripted programming for Hulu Originals and ABC Entertainment. “Despite the numerous challenges they’ve faced along the way, the Conners have reminded us that it’s not about what we have, but who we love.”
The cast and creative team, over video and email interviews edited for clarity and length, discussed the show’s topical storylines, guest stars who blew them away and what it was like to say farewell one last time.
‘The Conners’ has tackled subjects like domestic violence, addiction, sexuality, gender and racism over the course of its run. In the Season 7 premiere, it came back around to Roseanne’s opioid death with Jackie wanting to pursue a lawsuit and Dan not wanting to open old wounds again.
Helford: The opioid story came back because the Supreme Court handed us a story. They turned over that rule about immunity for the opioid manufacturers, which made it possible for people to begin lawsuits again.
Rasmussen: The timing is crazy, though, because when we wrote it, that hadn’t happened yet and it just set this up for the season. It’s crazy.
Goodman: It makes it so much easier to play [that story] because the audience knows what’s going on. And even if they don’t, there’s a depth there that would make it interesting. There’s so much history between Dan and Jackie that the playing of the story becomes easier and you don’t have to explain that much.
Metcalf: The show has always been able to handle switching into intense scenes within the comedy. Although they’re rare, they’re really rewarding to play because they make the family relationships even deeper.
Rasmussen: These are all working-class issues, which most shows don’t deal with, the real issues. The middle of the country has been ignored for various reasons. But every episode that dealt with that was exciting to me because there’s so few shows like that anymore.
Laurie Metcalf and Lecy Goranson discuss the Season 3 premiere of “The Conners,” ABC’s first comedy to go back into production during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though the core cast has been playing their respective characters since 1988, the actors still found surprises as the Conners each continued their respective journeys.
Metcalf: I was pleasantly surprised with how the writers handled Jackie’s marriage [to Neville, played by Nat Faxon, in the Season 4 finale]. There wasn’t much in her past that suggested she’d be capable of a healthy relationship, but Jackie got her happy ending.
Gilbert: I have definitely discovered a lot over the past eight seasons, thanks in large part to our writers’ vision. I’m not sure these last six episodes [of Season 7] were as much about discovery as they were about wrapping things up and enjoying being these characters for the last moments.
Goodman: I know the guy [Dan], but it got to the point where I’d take him home with me. I really had to remind myself that this isn’t real. Forget about it. That’s disturbing at my age. It’s just that I care for everybody so much. It’s a hard breakup.
Goranson: What I love about Becky is that you really can make your way at any age in life. Here she is with a daughter when she didn’t plan on having a child. It was a one-night stand. Then she meets this really sweet guy [Tyler, played by Sean Astin, who joined in Season 5] and being sober, the relationship aspect is more complicated.
The Conners’ lives managed to move forward with surprising twists and turns, like patriarch Dan eventually dating and marrying musician/bartender Louise (Katey Sagal) during Season 4. Even Goodman was surprised the pairing worked.
Goodman: Well, that’s just Katey. I don’t think we could have gotten away with it with anybody else. I think Dan was looking forward to playing the field a little bit, but Katey is so great. We hit it off naturally.
For others, the twists included themes about addiction and acceptance of who they are.
Goranson: Becky’s journey as an addict [with alcohol] has been really interesting. With addiction, it seems like it’s always fresh since you’re omni-aware of what’s going on with your tendencies.
Ames McNamara (Mark, Darlene’s earnest son): I really appreciated the way the show let Mark discover who he is. It was important to establish that Mark was just a boy who liked girls’ clothes, which was fittingly real. Even though Mark eventually progressed from skirts to vintage cardigans and button-downs, that same initial level of authenticity was kept as Mark learned more about himself.
Emma Kenney (Harris, Darlene’s strong-willed daughter): One story that really stands out is when Harris tried to move out and be completely independent, only to realize she felt most at home with her family. Deep down, she’s still a Conner and at the end of the day, family is everything to her.
Helford says instead of the standard multiyear contract, “We had an agreement that we would only do one year at a time.” Yet, every year everyone signed back on to do more of the show.
Helford: We wrote every year as if it was the last except for the sixth year. We didn’t write like it was the last year and that’s why we needed a seventh year.
Gilbert: Part of it was because we continued to like the stories we were able to tell, but honestly a large part of it was that we just loved to be together. We laughed so much and had so much fun every day. I miss that a lot, and it’s a big loss not seeing the cast and crew every week.
Goodman: I don’t know what happened this year. I thought they had enough, ABC or Disney, because they cut back on a lot of stuff [previous seasons have ranged from 11 to 22 episodes]. I guess that’s what happens when you get a corporation running a studio because their bottom line is the stockholders and ours is our audience.
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1. Seth Green as Chad, Darlene’s friend, in Season 7. (Christopher Willard / Disney) 2. Lecy Goranson, left, and Nick Offerman as Adam in Season 6. (Christopher Willard / Disney) 3. Whoopi Goldberg as Ms. Glen, Mark’s music teacher, in Season 5. (Eric McCandless / ABC) 4. John Goodman, left, and Christopher Lloyd as Lou, Mark’s contrabassoon teacher, in Season 4. (Eric McCandless / ABC) 5. Laurie Metcalf, left, and Candice Bergen as Barb, Ben’s mother, in Season 3. (Eric McCandless / ABC)
A cavalcade of guest stars have appeared on the show and several left the cast and producers — who are stars in their own right — in awe.
Jay R. Ferguson (Ben, Darlene’s boss, then husband): I was very starstruck with the legendary Candice Bergen [who played Ben’s mother Barb in Season 3]. I loved hearing her stories, especially about her hosting “SNL” as the first female host as well as the first two-time host.
Caplan: Dan Aykroyd was on and that was huge for me. They said, “Don’t shake his hand. He doesn’t like that.” I said, “I’m gonna go make him uncomfortable. I have to shake his hand!”
Gilbert: This season it was fantastic having Jane Lynch. I just love listening to how she spins a line. It was also awesome to have Seth Green, a personal friend of mine from my teenage years. It was extra special to get to wrap up the show with someone who I have known and loved since the original run.
Goranson: Nick Offerman came in for our premiere last season and it was a tricky role because it was a Gordon Ramsay-kind of person. A lot of us in the cast have a really dry sense of humor and he just came in and hit it out of the park. Also, Whoopi Goldberg was amazing, and Jane Curtin was just incredible.
McNamara: Paul Reubens, Christopher Lloyd … the list goes on. I do want to give a special mention to Sean Astin, even though he’s really part of the family now. Sean is the absolute nicest person, and he brightened the mood on set.
The iconic Conners couch. The aged afghan. The kitchen set. What did the cast take home when the show wrapped?
Metcalf: I have two coffee mugs from the set. I only have to glance at them now to remember all the times I’d make an entrance through the mud room, head straight to the coffee pot and pour some into one of those mugs. A great prop — very handy!
Goranson: I took some of Becky’s comfort clothes like an old jersey.
Goodman: I took a garden gnome from the kitchen. It had no business being there anyway.
Gilbert: The couch and afghan, along with the entire main kitchen and living room set are in Carsey Werner’s storage. I took a few of the plates that hang around the archway in the kitchen, and I took the [house] address — the individual numbers. I have to mount them and frame them.
For its seventh and final season, ‘The Conners’ will only have six episodes total. Was it enough to wrap things up?
Gilbert: I’m happy with what we have. We could have taken a full season to do it but, that said, there was something nice about working in this smaller framework, almost like a limited series. We did take one idea and weave it throughout the six episodes in a way that would have been different in a longer season.
Helford: We made it work. Sometimes you have more episodes and you start creating transitional episodes, but a couple storylines got cut shorter than they would have been.
Caplan: I would say we had to be very efficient with our time. These are very long arcs for these characters, so to bring them to a satisfying conclusion in six episodes was a challenge, but I think we all feel pretty good about pulling it off.
Emotions were running high when the final episode taped last October.
Gilbert: Honestly, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I would have grief, but then it would switch to this feeling that I couldn’t ground myself in the idea that it was over. It felt surreal. Laurie and I talk about it still. I think we can’t fully grasp that it’s over because it was such a part of our routine for so many years.
Goodman: It was hard. No, it wasn’t hard to get through. We did it. But, you know, when you pull the plug on something like that, it’s hard for me. But we had so much fun doing it. It’ll always be a great memory.
Metcalf: I think we all felt, cast and crew, very fragile during the last taping. We’d been together for decades and this was the end. I was having a “magical thinking” experience and was convinced we’d all be back on the set on Monday like always. It’s taken a long time to process.
Goranson: You felt the height and the legacy of it. And it was really powerful, incredibly emotional. We just had to get through it because we couldn’t let the emotion take over. We had to soldier on Conner-style and just tough it out.
Ferguson: I will miss those moments backstage with everyone on tape night, right before we would get introduced. I was always pinching myself as I looked around at our cast as well as all the amazing guest stars we had, not understanding how I was there, but eternally grateful that I was.
McNamara: My first day of work was just after my 10th birthday, and my last was on my 17th birthday. I can remember walking on to the stage for the first table read pretty clearly, even though I don’t think I had a good sense of the amazing family I was joining at the time.
Despite a pattern of the other shoe dropping whenever joy comes to the family, the two-part series finale, slated to air April 23, could give us something resembling a happily ever after, or so we hope.
Helford: The final episode is a very big thing for us. The whole thing started with legacy fixing, and so we really do believe that this now has the proper end to it. And we broke some rules in the end. When we shot that last episode, there wasn’t a person who wasn’t crying.
Goranson: In a Connerian way — is that a new term? — no one’s getting the white picket fence in the suburbs unless it’s way in the suburbs. But for them, yes, it’s a happy ending.
Gilbert: There is a Conners-ever-after. We like to keep it honest and funny. There is also a moment at the end of the finale that I haven’t seen before on another sitcom.
Goodman: It might be time to move on, but if I could find a way to put the band back together, I sure would.
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