Very Good Analysis of 'Roseanne'

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From the BBC Comedy Guide
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/ar..._7775535.shtml

Roseanne
USA, ABC (Wind Dancer Productions/The Carsey-Werner Company/Full Moon & High Tide Productions), Sitcom, colour, 1988
Starring: Roseanne Barr, John Goodman, Sara Gilbert

A major landmark on the US comedy landscape, Roseanne attracted huge controversy both on and behind the screen. At the centre of both was Roseanne herself, a brilliant standup comic here portraying Roseanne Conner, a variation of a character she developed for the stage.

Roseanne Conner is a sharp, wisecracking, powerful (but not overbearing) wife to husband Dan, her high-school sweetheart; she is also mother to children D J, Darlene and Becky; and sister to Jackie. Living at 714 Delaware Street in Lanford, Illinois, the family are strictly blue-collar and financially challenged but manage to carry on thanks to Dan's determination to make ends meet, Roseanne's own jobs (plastics factory, beauty salon, waitress and more) and her gallows humour. Their two daughters both experience the early trials of courtship and the youngest child, the son, surrounded by dominant women, tends to bond closest with his father. Jackie is a neurotic individual who seems doomed to an unwanted single life and unsatisfactory affairs (although she does eventually marry, have a child and divorce). On the surface then, Roseanne could be mistaken for just another working-class sitcom. Actually, it was America's most groundbreaking 'seriously' funny series since All In The Family made more than 15 years earlier.

What made Roseanne different was its jaw-dropping social realism, brutally naked honesty and uncomfortable depiction of a family. Both Roseanne and Dan were overweight, and their children were far from perfect: lying, keeping secrets from their parents and displaying anti-social traits. They loved each other but often they didn't seem to like each other very much, if at all. The strongest arguments ever spat out in a sitcom littered the plots, and subjects considered taboo for most US comedies (homosexuality, under-age sex, drug taking, infidelity and the like) were considered fair game for Roseanne. Only Married...With Children came anywhere close to this series' obsession with the dark side of the American dream.

During the long, long run of the series a huge amount of semi-regular characters were introduced, including long-term boyfriends for Becky and Darlene (Mark and David); Roseanne and Jackie's disagreeable mother, Bev; Dan's friend Arnie (played by Roseanne's real-life husband Tom Arnold); Roseanne's gay boss Leon; and her bisexual friend Nancy. The relationships and interplay between these and many other resident and visiting characters are way too complicated to detail here, suffice to say that, beneath the complexities, the core was the struggle of everyday life. However, although the show could be hysterically funny, with spot-on performances right down the cast, Roseanne just wouldn't have been Roseanne without Roseanne.

Roseanne Barr was born in Salt Lake City on 3 November 1953, but although she realised from an early age that she was funny, she didn't begin performing until the end of the 1970s, by which time she had long been married and mothered four children. She found success almost immediately, and her uncompromising, feminist material assured her of notoriety. In these early days she counted a sizeable lesbian contingent among her supporters, but as her act developed she appealed to a wider audience, one that, she herself was surprised to see, also comprised many males. She started appearing on TV in the mid 1980s, making the most impact with her enraged, working-class, no-nonsense housewife character - a towering creation that was a million miles away from the US domestic homemakers normally depicted. Roseanne was now only a step away.

From the off, there was friction on the set of Roseanne - for a start, head writer Matt Williams and Roseanne held widely differing opinions about the shape of the show, a clash that led to a well-publicised falling out. Reportedly, Roseanne was outraged that Williams alone received the 'creator' credit on the series, pointing out that the show was based fundamentally on the character she had developed for her standup act. (Her 1987 HBO special, which features this stage persona, seems to bear out the fact - see following entry.) But, she lost the battle, so much that even when she managed to force Williams off the series he still received his credit, the star having to be content with the secondary 'based on a character created by Roseanne Arnold' line.

This was just the tip of the iceberg, though: scores of other sensational clashes occurred between the star and her creative crew over the years, most of which, such as the dismissal of several teams of writers, were picked up gleefully by the press. One major incident was the collapse of Roseanne's real-life marriage to fellow cast member Tom Arnold; this was so dramatic, indeed, that it was turned into a 1994 US TV movie, Roseanne And Tom: Behind The Scenes (with Patrika Darbo and Stephen Lee in the lead roles). An edition of the BBC2 documentary series Funny Business (13 December 1992) - shot during the writing, planning and recording of a Roseanne episode - amply depicted the frustrations, anger and resentment that existed behind the scenes. Perhaps as a result of all these problems, Roseanne was veritably snubbed by those who decide the Emmy Awards - it wasn't even nominated for the honour Outstanding Comedy Series.

But - and it is important not to allow the problems to overshadow this - on-screen, Roseanne maintained a terrifically high standard. The series rarely wavered in quality and was also never afraid to experiment and innovate - with its annual gruesome Hallowe'en specials, for example, which featured truly gory special effects; its dream-sequence shows; its 'blooper' closing credit sequences; its episodes that spoofed other series, and, perhaps most remarkably, an entire episode that parodied the sugar-sweet black and white US domestic sitcoms of the 1950s ('The Fifties Show').

Because of all the creative problems, every new season of Roseanne was reckoned to be its last, but the series ran and ran. Its ninth and final season though, 1996-97, is considered by critics to have been one too many. The opening episode saw the Conners win $108m on the Illinois state lottery and the ensuing episodes attempted to show that, despite the money, they all remained essentially the same people. (A similar ruse occurred in the British series Only Fools And Horses but here the windfall came in the last episode. This allowed the series to end on a high note and prevented the writer, John Sullivan, from having to re-invent the format to feature the one-time strugglers in a grandiose environment.) By the show's high standards, the last season of Roseanne was a major disappointment - in the UK, C4 relegated it to a late-night slot, which spoke volumes considering that the channel had hitherto vigorously championed the series, with, including repeats, more than 400 transmissions inside eight years. But the final season did include a remarkable crossover episode in which Edina and Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous turned up, in character, in a story co-written by Jennifer Saunders, the first example of characters from a British series appearing in a completely different US production. This was no coincidence, though: Roseanne had purchased the American adaptation rights to AbFab and was planning its launch at this time.

Roseanne was finally laid to rest on 20 May 1997, ending a problematic programme that thrived despite, or perhaps because of, the creative differences behind the screen. There is no doubt that some of the criticisms levelled at Roseanne, and her refusal to compromise, were born of the sexist attitude that perceives a determined man as being 'strong' but a determined woman as 'difficult'. Her achievement in getting a smash-hit primetime network show that featured non-handsome (but not unattractive) characters facing real problems in an imperfect world was considerable, however, and its impact cannot be underestimated in the annals of US television.

*Notes: Early episodes credited the star as Roseanne Barr (her maiden name, even though she had married and subsequently divorced Bill Pentland in the early 1970s). In 1991, after her marriage to Tom Arnold, she changed her name to Roseanne Arnold, at which point the screen credits for the episodes of Roseanne already in syndication were retrospectively altered. From the seventh season onwards (September 1994), following her divorce from Arnold and marriage to Ben Thomas, she dropped her surname altogether for professional purposes, being credited simply as Roseanne.

The series also inspired the US Saturday-morning children's cartoon series Little Rosey, voiced by Roseanne and screened in the UK by C4 on Sundays in the Early Morning strand from 19 January 1992; and Rosey And Buddy, an animated cartoon voiced by Roseanne and Tom Arnold, first screened in the UK by C4 on 26 December 1992.

Roseanne returned in autumn 1998 with The Roseanne Show, a syndicated US TV chat-show. C5 picked it up for British transmission, airing editions from 30 September 1998, very soon after their US broadcast.


Roseanne was one of the comedians whose career featured in the BBC2 series Stand Up America, in the edition screened on 15 March 2003.