TMC
05-25-2022, 06:29 AM
https://jacksonupperco.com/2022/05/24/the-seven-best-roseanne-episodes-of-season-nine/
The final season of Roseanne never should have happened. Although we’ve seen this series decline annually following its peak era as a result of both a dwindling capacity to freshly explore the characters in story — which had become dominated by self-indulgent gimmicks, including serialized romantic angst, examples of stunt casting, and an abundance of metatheatrical dream/fantasy sequences — along with a failure to continue reiterating the show’s initial working-class thesis in its cultivation of plot, nothing that’s come before is quite like Season Nine. One of the big problems is that the show was building to an ending in Eight, but in order to keep the company together for another year, Roseanne and Carsey-Werner negotiated a return at a lower price — with the biggest cut coming from the reduced presence of John Goodman, who only signed for about half of this season’s output. Considering that Dan is a staple of the cast — the patriarch of this nuclear family — his absence hurts the utilization of ALL the central characters, especially Roseanne, who’s now too often without the figure with whom she has the strongest bond. To circumvent this challenge, Nine — now led by writer Daniel Palladino (later of Gilmore Girls), but with more textual involvement than ever before from Roseanne Barr herself, who adds even more of her own personal ideology, if not in story, then in the dialogue — totally upends the series’ premise by having the Conner family win the lottery and become multi-millionaires overnight. This is an inherent risk — the show can no longer pretend it’s still as premised… and yet, the new “situation” clears away the expectations for working-class economic drama by literally predicating the changes on their financial status. In this regard, the development is tied to the show’s DNA, and there are some indications, particularly at the beginning of the season, that this narrative arc was indeed designed with an eye on sincerely exploring the comedy and drama that might arise from a new fish-out-of-water lifestyle for these characters: blue-collar folks in a white-collar world. Naturally, that’s far less relatable than what the series used to be — and far less realistic too — but at least there’s a logical explanation, and a chance to examine characters in a new, premise-adjacent way…
The final season of Roseanne never should have happened. Although we’ve seen this series decline annually following its peak era as a result of both a dwindling capacity to freshly explore the characters in story — which had become dominated by self-indulgent gimmicks, including serialized romantic angst, examples of stunt casting, and an abundance of metatheatrical dream/fantasy sequences — along with a failure to continue reiterating the show’s initial working-class thesis in its cultivation of plot, nothing that’s come before is quite like Season Nine. One of the big problems is that the show was building to an ending in Eight, but in order to keep the company together for another year, Roseanne and Carsey-Werner negotiated a return at a lower price — with the biggest cut coming from the reduced presence of John Goodman, who only signed for about half of this season’s output. Considering that Dan is a staple of the cast — the patriarch of this nuclear family — his absence hurts the utilization of ALL the central characters, especially Roseanne, who’s now too often without the figure with whom she has the strongest bond. To circumvent this challenge, Nine — now led by writer Daniel Palladino (later of Gilmore Girls), but with more textual involvement than ever before from Roseanne Barr herself, who adds even more of her own personal ideology, if not in story, then in the dialogue — totally upends the series’ premise by having the Conner family win the lottery and become multi-millionaires overnight. This is an inherent risk — the show can no longer pretend it’s still as premised… and yet, the new “situation” clears away the expectations for working-class economic drama by literally predicating the changes on their financial status. In this regard, the development is tied to the show’s DNA, and there are some indications, particularly at the beginning of the season, that this narrative arc was indeed designed with an eye on sincerely exploring the comedy and drama that might arise from a new fish-out-of-water lifestyle for these characters: blue-collar folks in a white-collar world. Naturally, that’s far less relatable than what the series used to be — and far less realistic too — but at least there’s a logical explanation, and a chance to examine characters in a new, premise-adjacent way…