I Missed My Mom. So I Rewatched All Nine Seasons of 'Roseanne.'

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Flytrap Fridays will run here on the blog, free for everyone to read, until Election Day. Think of it as a little ~ amuse bouche ~ for the Flytrap-curious. In our first edition, Flytrap co-founder s.e. smith brought us spooky-season goodness with “The Pumpkins of Fir Street.” In upcoming editions, we’ll be getting naughty with female villains, appreciating the freaky feminism of CBS’ “Evil,” and unpacking why evangelicals love to hate Halloween. Today, we’re pleased to bring you a reconsideration of “Roseanne” from Flytrap co-founder Tina Vásquez.

When Roseanne debuted on ABC on October 18, 1988, I was 3, my mom was 27, and we had just 22 more years together. When you love your mom and she dies, this is how you measure time. 

When my mom and I watched Roseanne, we would cuddle up on the couch or sprawl out on her giant bed. We were both prone to bouts of silence in the face of my dad’s angry outbursts, which is why I’ve come to believe so much of our unspoken obsession with the sitcom was really our mutual fascination with the show’s fearless, loudmouth lead, Roseanne Conner. 

Played perfectly by comedian Roseanne Barr, Roseanne Conner was brash, opinionated, and sarcastic. As a fat, working-class woman and a young mother who never left her small hometown, Rosenne was often treated poorly by more affluent bosses, mean customers, and sometimes even random men at The Lobo, the local dive bar where she and her friends periodically drank away their sorrows. But at home, Roseanne is the Queen Mother and ruler of the roost, equally loved and feared by her husband, Dan, and their three young children Becky, Darlene, and D.J. Sure, Roseanne often yelled at her family, but she was also attentive, affectionate, and understanding. Roseanne was everything my grandmother failed to be for my mom, and everything my mom struggled to be for me. 

Like my family, the Conners were beat down by life. They lived in the fictitious, economically depressed town of Lanford, Illinois, where Roseanne and Dan worked an endless stream of shitty jobs. Sometimes Dan couldn’t find construction work, so Roseanne pulled additional shifts on the line at the Wellman Plastics factory with her sister, Jackie, played by comedic genius Laurie Metcalf. When the sisters’ demeaning factory boss imposed an impossible quota, Roseanne leads a factory walkout and Jackie is the first to follow. Seasons 2 and 3 are mostly about the dysfunctional Conner family trying to scrape by. In defiance of Roseanne, Jackie becomes a cop because it’s the only career option available in Lanford. Roseanne, on the other hand, takes a series of even shittier jobs, including one at a fast food chicken joint where her asshole manager is a teenage boy who talks down to her.

My dad always says that being “poor” in the U.S. is very different from being poor in Mexico, the country where he was born and raised. While the Conners did have a two-story house, they also had a mountain of debt and a mortgage they couldn’t afford. They were the first working-class family I ever saw in a sitcom, and Roseanne and Dan were the first fat people I ever saw on television. The couple bounced checks, dodged bill collectors, and fought about money, just like my parents. And just like my mom, Roseanne fed her family cheap meals and processed foods, like meatloaf stretched to the limit with off-brand cornflakes. Roseanne’s jokes about “poor white trash” made my mom howl with laughter. I don’t recall how my mom explained what the phrase meant. I just remember that it wasn’t treated as a denigrating term; it simply was.

But of course, there were also marked differences between our families. My mom gave birth to me, and she was a parent to my two brothers from my dad’s previous relationship with a teenage chola. (Roseanne could never.) We called my mom Blondie because she stuck out like a sore thumb in our brown family. And while Roseanne escaped her abusive childhood home by marrying her loving high school sweetheart, my mom left behind the white trash hell of her abusive childhood to build a scrappy life with my controlling and complicated dad. 

As a kid growing up in an abusive home, Roseanne showed me that violence didn’t have to be a condition of poverty. Though Roseanne and Dan were hit by their parents, they vowed to break the cycle with their own children. It was earth-shattering to realize adults aren’t preprogrammed to beat their kids; they had a choice in the matter. Abuse is a theme in the series, cited as the reason Roseanne binge eats and struggles with her weight and why Jackie only dates emotionally unavailable men and in one case, a man who hits her. In Season 5, Roseanne grapples with the abuse she and Jackie experienced from their father. In Season 6, when Roseanne loses control of her temper and wallops D.J. for stealing the family car, she takes the time to tearfully explain to him that she was abused. She also does something I did not know parents could do: She apologizes to D.J. and she vows to never hit him again.

When Roseanne reckoned with her childhood abuse, she opened up and bloomed for her children. My mother had no reckoning. She simply withered up and died. 

When people say they think about their dead loved ones every day, they really mean they are on a quest to find pieces of them to hold onto as memories fade into the ether. What they really mean is grief is a sonofabitch, but sometimes you want to invite it in and roll around in it because it’s the only remaining way to forge a connection with the person you lost. 

Over the last three months, I rewatched all nine seasons of the first iteration of Roseanne for no other reason than I missed my mom. It had been at least a decade since I watched a full episode of the show, so I went in with some questions: Did Roseanne Conner hold up as a feminist and working-class icon? How did that perception gel with the character, who—as I later learned from a late night Wikipedia search—voted for Donald Trump as part of the 2018 Roseanne reboot? Was this trajectory a reflection of the woman behind the character, or simply art imitating life? (There of course was a very real phenomenon among white, working-class Americans who previously identified as liberal and later voted for Trump.) 

That last question may seem ridiculous, given what we know about Barr. It wasn’t exactly shocking when she was fired from the reboot for a series of racist tweets. Prior to her very public termination, Barr was openly racist, transphobic, and Islamophobic—and she was also a proud, Trump-worshiping conspiracy theorist. Perhaps it’s granting Barr too much grace to say she is one of the most striking examples of what happens when a Boomer has unfettered internet access and the far-right algorithm, full of Q-Anon conspiracy theories and anti-vax “research,” eats their brain. (It’s worth mentioning that at a recent MAGA event hosted by Tucker Carlson, Barr likened liberals to “vampires” that “love the taste of human flesh.”) 

As much as I wanted to indulge in a comfort show that reminded me of those nights spent on the couch with my mom, I’m sincerely disappointed by Roseanne Barr and Conner for being such embarrassingly predictable peddlers of white rage and ignorance. 

I know what some of you are thinking: All of the signs were there! The Conners were exactly the kind of Midwestern family to embrace Trump’s rhetoric, and Lanford was exactly the kind of town where Trumpism would take hold. Over nine seasons, we learn that Lanford is where hardworking families like the Conners lose their jobs and their homes. It’s a place where a shuttered factory can wipe out income for multiple lines of the same family. But as a reporter in the South covering labor movements led by low-wage workers, I’ve seen firsthand how the denial of a safety net can be a real unifying force across race, gender, and generations. The pain of being abandoned doesn’t have to calcify into something hard and mean. 

But Barr’s commitment to tarnishing her own legacy spans more than a decade. I first caught wind of her hard-right turn when reporting a story for Bitch Media about feminism failing trans women. By 2013, Barr was already a full fledged TERF spewing hateful and dangerous rhetoric about trans women. This was during Twitter’s heyday and admittedly, I was an internet loudmouth who really relished having a platform for the first time. In this case, I used my platform to ask the feminist publication Bust why they granted Barr an advice column knowing she’s a transphobe. I don’t remember the exchange, but it ended with my childhood hero calling me an asshole and saying “fuck u.” 

I can still remember my heart racing at the realization that Barr cussed me out on the internet. It was funny and upsetting and weird. Twitter made celebrities accessible, and it also put their shortcomings in plain sight.

In a way, this is what it was like to rewatch Roseanne as an adult who, on many days, feels like a 39-year-old motherless child. I no longer only saw my parents in Roseanne and Dan’s bickering around the kitchen table; I saw myself and my fiancé arguing over Sunday breakfast about the mortgage and the amount of money I send to my dad each month. 

But I also noticed all the places where the show took the easy route on subjects like race and abortion, or storylines where Roseanne failed to dig deeper. It remains a terrible shame that Jackie, a thoughtful and funny character, was relegated to slut jokes or spinster jokes with very little in between. It also pained me to watch the series rub against necessary social commentary before missing the mark entirely. 

In one striking example, Dan decides to leave the city job he once coveted for a chance to make life-changing money working on the construction of a new prison. It could have been a powerful commentary on how prisons portray themselves as job creators, only to decimate small communities like Lanford and pay locals low wages to carry out the evils of mass incarceration. Instead, Roseanne salivates at the prospect of the Conners getting in on the prison building boom. “The way this country’s going now, they’re always going to be building new prisons,” Roseanne reasons. “The way that people hardly have to pay for what they do at all, it kind of makes crime look like a really good thing to get into” because they’re going to start putting prisons up “faster than Starbucks.” 

In other ways, the show remains shockingly groundbreaking, including in its treatment of sexual and reproductive health issues like teen sex and pregnancy. Toward the end of the original show’s run, Roseanne and Dan even decide to have a fourth child in their early 40s and the show follows the complications of Rosenne’s pregnancy.

As more highly respected men in Hollywood are revealed to be pedophiles and rapists, there continues to be a lot of hand-wringing about whether it’s possible to separate the art from the artist. We don’t grapple with similar questions when women like Barr are revealed to be horrible in markedly different ways, but horrible nonetheless. I’m not suggesting we embrace her. I’m merely struggling with how to feel about a brilliant piece of pop culture made by a version of a person who doesn’t exist anymore. Because I can’t deny my love for Roseanne, the powerful ways it reminds me of my own flawed mother, and the indelible mark the show made on my life. 

I’m now sincerely questioning how much Roseanne shaped my interests. Does my obsession with Halloween come from Roseanne and Dan? Was my introduction to Bikini Kill because of a 1995 cameo by Jenna Elfman, who plays a hitch hiking riot grrrl? As a poor woman with no role models to rely upon, did Roseanne’s quest to be a writer inspire my own journey into the profession? And there is no question that the opening chords of “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” make me cry every time because it reminds me of being small and feeling safe snuggled up next to my mom on the couch and watching Bonnie Bramlett sing a breathtaking rendition as part of a Mother’s Day episode. 

In the final show of the original series, Roseanne says she and Dan always felt like it was their responsibility as parents to improve the lives of their children by 50% over their own. I’ve thought about that line a lot over the last few days and as we head into the dreaded month of November when I celebrate the birthday of a mom I haven’t had in 14 years. 

There is no doubt my mom would be proud of me for carving out the life I want instead of simply enduring the one handed to me. But I still haven’t figured out how to do anything but endure her absence—or become unmoored by it.

I can’t say for sure if Roseanne built the life she wanted with Dan, or if she simply settled for the one she had in Lanford. For some clarity—and against my better judgment—I decided to check out the Roseanne reboot and The Conners spinoff. I was not prepared for how it would make me feel to see Roseanne and Dan as elders, sitting around the same kitchen table and now complaining about the cost of prescription medications. I could only think about my dad, sitting alone at his kitchen table each morning, sipping coffee in the quiet. For all of the problems my parents had, I know they loved each other. My mom would wake up at 5 a.m. each day to catch my dad before he went to sleep after working the night shift. They’d sit around the kitchen table talking, drinking coffee, and planning the future that would never come. I imagine mornings are when my mom is most present to my dad, and when he feels her absence the most.

The first episode of The Conners gives us a glimpse of what a future without Roseanne will look like for Dan. Barr, of course, was written off the show because of her racism. Given everything we know about Landford and the “economic anxieties” that persist for working class people well into old age, it is both shocking and fitting that Roseanne dies of an opioid overdose.

My mom—battered by men and life and low self-esteem—would have never seen herself as having the guts and grit of Roseanne Conner. But she did, she really fucking did. She too was a small town girl with a big personality and few places to funnel it. Every day, she went to her shitty job and then came home to her messy house, loud kids, and sparse refrigerator and somehow made it work. Roseanne Conner and my mom always found a way to spin magic out of nothing. Years after their deaths, I’m still under their spell.

This piece was edited by Evette Dionne.

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