The Conners will be coming to an end next year, thus closing the book on the Roseanne-verse once and for all. Unless of course, they decide to just reboot it again 20 years from now with any surviving cast members who haven’t turned into alt-right internet trolls.
It was recently announced that the seventh and final season of the show will be just six episodes long, in what’s being described as a “farewell event,” which kind of sounds more like a goodbye party for a co-worker nobody likes. The season won’t begin until March 2025, when it will have been a whopping 10 months since the Season Six finale aired and ABC first began hyping the final batch of episodes.
Of course, ending a Roseanne spin-off comes with some heavy baggage, considering how the first show wrapped up. The original series finale revealed that Darlene was married to Becky’s husband Mark, and Becky was really married to Darlene’s husband David. Oh, and Dan was dead. That’s because the bulk of the series was really a novel being written by the Roseanne Conner character.
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Years later, the Roseanne reboot revealed that the show was really a novel, within another novel, which a (suddenly alive) Dan discovers and tosses in the garbage. This franchise would give M.C. Escher a migraine.
The Conners executive producer Bruce Helford attempted to pacify anxious fans, telling TVLine earlier this year: “We carry the weight of the Roseanne legacy. It’s a big, big deal.” He also noted: “I can promise you this: They will never win the lottery, and they will never be rich.”
The lottery mention is, of course, a reference to the final season of the original Roseanne. Even before the bizarre twist ending, Roseanne was already a wacky dumpster fire of a show. At the beginning of the ninth season, the Conners won over $100 million playing the lottery. The family’s new lifestyle paved the way for a number of reality-bending storylines and broad parodies. For example, we got a Rosemary’s Baby spoof that crossed over with Absolutely Fabulous.
Then there was shockingly bad “Roseambo,” the episode in which Roseanne battles terrorists on a train and befriends Hillary Clinton.
Did we mention that Roseanne once went to a spa, underwent past life regression hypnosis and discovered that she used to be Xena: Warrior Princess.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Season Nine of Roseanne premiered mere months after Roseanne’s SNL knock-off, Saturday Night Special, was canceled by Fox.
In retrospect, it sure seems like Barr decided to turn her sitcom into a sketch show as soon as her sketch show was taken away. Either that, or the show just ran out of creative juice. In any case, The Conners seemingly won’t be going this route, probably because “learning from Roseanne’s mistakes” is seemingly the guiding principle of the series.