Roseanne Barr played the titular character in Roseanne for ten seasons, but wasn't on hand when it became The Conners. Here's what happened.

While Roseanne’s season 10 revival was a success, Roseanne Barr's return was short-lived, with the actress being forced out before it became The Conners. The tale of a working-class family and their outspoken titular matriarch, Roseanne provided a star-making role for its leading lady. As Roseanne Conner, comedian Roseanne Barr became a household name. Roseanne also boosted the careers of its stars John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf, and the show launched Sara Gilbert and Johnny Galecki to sitcom stardom. However, this did not last through to Roseanne’s final outing.

While its spinoff The Conners grounded its cameos in the show’s reality, Roseanne season 9 earned massive critical backlash for its unrealistic storylines, jarring tonal change, and pointless celebrity cameos. After spending almost a decade depicting the believably hardscrabble existence of the Conner family, Roseanne season 9 opened with the family winning the lottery and becoming millionaires overnight. This twist was abhorred by fans and critics alike and effectively ensured Roseanne’s subsequent cancelation. However, in 2017, Roseanne was revived for a successful season 10 (which opened with the revelation that season 9’s events never happened in-universe).

Roseanne Was Fired For Racist Tweets

However, after Roseanne’s critically and commercially successful season 10 revival, Barr drew substantial negative attention to the series due to her conduct on social media. Barr wrote a series of racist tweets about former Barack Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, prompting her dismissal from Roseanne. This left producers in something of a bind, as the network now needed to create a spinoff that could essentially act as “Roseanne sans Roseanne herself.” Thus, The Conners was born. The Conners kept Roseanne’s characters but killed off Roseanne, thus allowing the sitcom to continue without its title character.

While most shows would simply be canceled if their star was fired, The Conners proved a success with critics and viewers. Much like Adult Swim’s hit Rick and Morty years later, The Conners did not leave the door open for a potential return from its former star. The tweets that Barr authored were offensive enough to sever any ties between her and the network and, as of The Conners season 5 finale, there has been no mention of her potential return by the show’s creators. To ensure that viewers knew Barr’s character was gone for good, The Conners season 1, episode 1, “Keep on Truckin’,” gave the iconic character an offscreen death.

Roseanne Was Killed Off After Season 10 Revival

After the season 10 revival hinted obliquely at this plot twist, “Keep on Truckin’” revealed that Roseanne had been hiding a secret opioid addiction from her family for some time. This tragic twist resulted in her offscreen death by overdose between the two shows. The Conners brought back David, Chuckie Mitchell, and many other Roseanne stars, but the spinoff permanently shut down any chance of Barr’s return with this pilot episode. In “Keep on Truckin’” the Conner family learned of Roseanne’s death and processed their reactions in real-time, an audacious approach that proved surprisingly successful.

Roseanne Season 11 Became The Conners

The rating success of Roseanne’s season 10 revival meant that Roseanne season 11 was always guaranteed to happen in some form or another. However, with Roseanne gone, season 11 was reinvented as The Conners and the focus of the series shifted. While The Conners still featured some reactionary humor (and still does as of season 5), there was less focus on intergenerational conflict in The Conners than there had been in Roseanne season 10. This was an improvement since Roseanne season 10 had altered the character’s persona to fit this misplaced humor. For example, one scene in Roseanne season 10, episode 3, “Roseanne Gets the Chair,” saw the title character dunk her granddaughter in a kitchen sink to uproarious applause.

This scene jarred with Roseanne season 6, episode 11, “The Driver’s Seat,” wherein Roseanne tearfully apologized to her young son after hitting him and admitted that her father psychically abused her too. For all its Roseanne character cameos, the season 10 revival failed to recapture the balance between broad humor and heartfelt family drama found in the original series. With Barr gone, The Conners managed to replicate Roseanne’s original appeal. Ironically, The Conners season 1 felt more like classic Roseanne than the season 10 revival.

The Conners Struggled With Roseanne’s Legacy

While The Conners was largely successful in the show’s attempts to keep Roseanne’s legacy alive without the show’s former leading lady, it was not an entirely smooth transition. One major issue that The Conners struggled with in the show’s early seasons was the legacy of Roseanne’s character in-universe. When Roseanne’s widow Dan remarried, no one even mentioned Roseanne’s name on the day of the wedding even though the entire family was present for the ceremony. Fortunately, for allof The Conners season 5’s failures, this later outing of the spinoff grew much more comfortable referencing Roseanne.

The Conners Improved After Roseanne’s Death

After the initial shock of Roseanne’s offscreen death passed, The Conners had an unsteady start. The show’s inability to mention Roseanne without bringing down the cheery sitcom mood was noticeable and attempts to avoid references to Roseanne felt obvious. However, this problem did not persist for too long. One thing that helped matters was that sitcom stalwart Katey Sagal proved a perfect addition to the cast of The Conners as Dan’s new love interest, Louise. A rock musician who had no interest in playing surrogate mother to his adult children, Louise could not have been less like Roseanne and thus did not feel like a replacement.

Furthermore, later seasons ofThe Conners used cameos more carefully than the approach taken by Roseanne’s later seasons. While The Conners did make use of stars such as William H. Macy and Sean Astin, these guest stars played original characters whose subplots brought characters like Dan and Becky into focus. This allowed The Conners to feel like a cohesive series in its own right rather than a continuation of Roseanne that was missing one vital ingredient. Thus, firing Barr and turning Roseanne into The Conners may have been the best decision that the creators of the sitcom could have made in the end.