How Losing Roseanne Made The Conners’ Dan A Better Father

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Killing off Roseanne allowed hit sitcom The Conners to make her husband, John Goodman's Dan, a more rounded, funnier character than ever before.

BY CATHAL GUNNING
PUBLISHED 10 HOURS AGO

While losing the show's former star Roseanne was not easy for The Conners, the death did give the family's patriarch Dan a chance to grow and mature as a character. Few sitcoms have had as dramatic and messy a history as The Conners. Debuting in 1989, the show used to be known as Roseanne and told the story of the working-class family the Conners, and their eponymous mother, lovable firebrand Roseanne.

Throughout the ‘90s, Roseanne was a reliably popular hit that offered a warm-hearted but unvarnished look at working-class life in America. Not as crude as Married With Children but not as sentimental as The Cosby Show, Roseanne was a critical success until its messy final season. As a result, many fans were thrilled when a revival was announced in 2017.

The Conners Wrote Roseanne Out In The Best Possible Way

However, only one season into Roseanne’s revival, the show became The Conners when Roseanne Barr exited the series suddenly. Due to racist remarks by the actor, Roseanne was retooled into The Conners, and Barr’s character was swiftly killed off via an opioid overdose. While the series as a whole took a while to find its footing in the absence of its former star, the loss of Roseanne from the line-up was the best thing that could happen to John Goodman’s Dan. Outside of being Roseanne’s disapproving husband and her good-natured but un-involving straight man, the role of Dan Conner never made the most of Goodman’s considerable talents as a comedic and dramatic actor. However, Roseanne’s death gave the series regular the opportunity to move from bumbling sitcom dad territory into a more well-rounded and surprisingly aspirational father figure, with Goodman’s patriarch being a more believable, lovable character than ever before by the time Dan married Louise in The Conners season 4.

Dan’s Role In Roseanne

Throughout the original Roseanne, Dan’s character was an uneasy marriage of the classic goofy sitcom dad (in the vein of Al Bundy and Homer Simpson) and the straight man to Roseanne’s absurd antics. He was laidback and well-meaning, but Roseanne’s comparative zaniness meant that the character never needed to grow or change too much since he was always guaranteed to be the more reasonable Conner parent by default. This also meant he was one of the show’s less reliably hilarious characters, despite Goodman’s impressive screen CV proving the actor is a master of numerous styles of comedy. The deadpan that made Goodman a reliable scene-stealer in Arachnophobia was often on show in Roseanne and The Conners, but Barr’s goofiness meant that Goodman’s larger-than-life comedy skills were often left on the shelf by the show.

How Roseanne’s Death Changed Dan (& The Conners)

Losing Roseanne forced The Conners to change its tone and make the series less goofy, while also forcing Dan to be a more present parent than ever before. Without a wacky main character anchoring the action, The Conners got a little more serious just in time for Dan to get sillier. Some of The Conners’ plots, such as Dan deciding to buy a waterbed while Louise is out of town, would not have worked as Roseanne episodes since Barr’s character was the more unhinged and playful of the duo, and these stories have seen Goodman show off comedic chops that the original series and The Conners season 1 missed out on. Meanwhile, just in time for The Conners to start taking on heavier themes like Becky’s drinking problem, the show started to take Dan more seriously and saw the character grow more thoughtful and present to his adult children than ever before.

As a result of Roseanne’s absence, Dan has been both a better father and a funnier character. With The Conners no longer focused on its former star, the sitcom has been able to flesh out both the dramatic and comedic aspects of her under-utilized screen husband, resulting in more depth for the character and more laughs from Goodman’s performances. While the sudden nature of Roseanne’s death is still jarring, it has not stopped Dan’s character growth from feeling real and believable. It took a few seasons for Dan to move past Roseanne on The Conners, believably slow progress that made up for how abrupt the character’s death was.

The Conners Still Addresses Real Issues

The Conners’ “Three Exes, Role Playing, and a Waterbed“ (season 4, episode 9) featured a joke about Dan tossing any bills that aren’t marked “final notice” back in the mail, touching on the working-class struggle that the original Roseanne was built on. The gag was a reminder that the character struggled realistically with providing for an ever-growing family of adult children (and their children), making it fortunate that Dan has become more up to the task since the death of Roseanne. While the antics of Ben and Darlene’s on-again, off-again relationship provide The Conners with a replacement for Roseanne’s constant high-energy dramatics, it has been harder for the show to bring back the heart that earlier seasons had. However, refusing to shy away from the economic realities of family life in America has made The Conners more adept at this, and making Dan a more competent father figure than ever before allows the show to continue adding these realistic notes without becoming too dark or bleak.

How Dan Can Keep Growing On The Conners

Giving the character a new relationship in the form of Katey Sagal’s Louise was a smart choice, as it kept Dan’s story moving and ensured he was neither always mourning Roseanne nor ignoring his loss. However, moving forward, The Conners needs more than a few jokes about Roseanne being in Hell to keep Dan’s character development feeling fresh. Although Sagal’s recent injury made Dan and Louise’s time apart necessary due to real-life circumstances, this did give Goodman’s character more to do in recent episodes and proved a boon to the sitcom’s formula. Allowing Dan to spend more time with his children’s children and having him intervene in the messiness between Ben and Darlene would give him more to do before Louise’s eventual return and could flesh out the character even further. Regardless of the route that the writers opt to take, however, The Conners’ Dan has already grown since his Roseanne iteration thanks to the freedom afforded to the character by his offscreen loss.

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It sort of gave us viewers a little bit more insight on who Dan Conner is as a person (it gave him more identity than "the guy married to Roseanne").