Dave Wood

A couple weeks ago, I pored (or was it BORED?) you with what amounted to a doctoral dissertation explaining how and why comic strips sometimes grow up and others stop in their tracks. This week I’ve promised to discuss a TV show about growing up, one even my wife likes! And rabid Roseanne fans won’t toss their cookies or whatever snack food, or verbal jibe Ms. Roseanne Barr fans chose to hurl at Dan, Darlene and her sister Becky in the earlier version. That’s right, Roseanne Barr!

No, no, she’s not back, but many of the rest of her crew are now ensconced in Lanford, Ill., a crummy Chicago suburb where the family has battled creditors, stupid neighbors and each other. Some critics say their antics are vulgar and nihilistic. Others –I am among them—say they are real, a dose of criticism our country needs. No less a novelist than the late Jon Hassler, rest his soul, acclaimed Roseanne “the Anton Chekov for American lower middle class.” (Hillary Clinton would probably call them “deplorables,” despite their left-wing leanings).

We began watching the original “Roseanne” when my student at Augsburg, Dave Raether, wrote to tell us he had moved to Hollywood and was writing and producing episodes for the Roseanne Barr show. We tuned in and I found Raether’s work on film as charming and humorous as his work was in my classroom back at Augsburg. My wife saw its virtues, but was not as enthusiastic about the female lead’s incessant antagonism, to which I, obviously, was better attuned! I watched for the more than 100 of Dave’s episodes, many of them based on his own life experiences in Robbinsdale, Minn. And then he wrote to say he was retiring, exhausted and depressed.

Later, in 2018, the sponsors caught wind of the Ambien-fired abusive Twitters Barr sent out onto the airwaves. Roseanne was finished because she couldn’t keep her ever-busy trap shut. I found out later she relinquished her rights to the show to save the 200 employees who were working on the show.

We tuned in to “The Conners” and be damned if it hasn’t become our favorite family, minus Roseanne Barr! We both loved it because most of our favorite characters have GROWN (see last week’s column) and give you a well-wrought display of getting by and getting along in contemporary America.

Dan Conner, the genial giant whose wife Roseanne has recently died from a drug overdose, has shed 100 pounds (he’s the one who didn’t grow!) But he has mellowed, and acts as the family’s Paterfamilias, offering his offspring sage advice, not always tongue in cheek; sometimes it’s really good!

Oldest daughter Becky is now 45, a recovering alcoholic widow who tends bar in a sleazy Lanford joint to earn money to study alcohol counseling at the local junior college. Darlene, whose snottiness is still everywhere in evidence (I’ve always loved her!), of course hates her good-paying job, is divorced from David, prince of nerds with a rock star. And little D.J. is now 6 feet tall and I suspect he no longer practices the Secret Sin in his bedroom to the delight of his older sisters. And he currently serves as the show’s some-time director.

My student has forsaken the once green meadows of writing sitcoms, which are no longer popular. He now toils in the browner meadows of non-fiction writing. Nevertheless, I encourage you to try the seeds of his creation. Dial “Conner Channel, Netflix.”