The Ten Best ROSEANNE Episodes of Season Five

[TMC]

https://jacksonupperco.com/2022/04/2...f-season-five/

Season Five tends to be popular with fans because it has a handful of big, memorable episodes with extremes of both comedy and drama, occupying a larger space in the series’ mythos than many of the quieter, low-concept entries that constituted its best in earlier years. Additionally, it’s a season by another great collection of scribes — led by Bruce Helford (future co-creator of The Drew Carey Show), and including Bruce Rasmussen (Drew Carey), Sy Dukane & Denise Moss (Murphy Brown, Frasier), Eileen Heisler & DeAnn Heline (The Middle), lone holdover Amy Sherman, and two writers who’ll actually survive the year and rise through the ranks, Rob Ulin (Malcolm In The Middle) and Eric Gilliland (Who’s The Boss?) — and they’re, like their predecessors from Three and Four, adept at keeping the show’s comedic fortunes high. However, as you know, Five isn’t one of my favorites — it’s outside the period of “novelty x knowingness” because it sees a decided drop in how the series both handles its characters and its premise. To start with the latter, this is the season where the show is no longer able to write to its working-class identity reliably within weekly story, and in fact, I think there’s a moment that signals this unfavorable change — it happens early in the year when Bev gives her daughters enough money to own and operate a restaurant. Now, naturally, food service isn’t an easy business, and the setting still evokes a certain tonality, but it marks a shift for the central character: she’s going from waitress to manager, or blue-collar to white-collar. Oh, yes, Dan and Roseanne already owned their own bike shop (which closes at the beginning of this year in one of the last genuine displays of relatable hardship for the entire series), but in order to do that, they had to take out another mortgage on the house. That is, they financially suffered. With the restaurant, they never suffer — they are literally given the help, trading economic drama for, I suppose, relational baggage between Roseanne and her mom (who becomes a partner), but that tradeoff is never maximized, especially when this move immediately launches the broader trend away from a narratively evident working-class ethos. From here, the show has to remind us of those origins by telling us with crude Bundy-like (anti-Roseanne) self-mockery — e.g., “Look how white trash we are!” — rather than regularly exhibiting demographic sympathy in narrative.