What to expect from ‘Roseanne’ spinoff, ‘The Conners’
ROSEANNE Conner’s family is tackling the fi rst holiday season without its matriarch in a new promo for ABC’s upcoming spinoff, “The Conners.”
When “The Conners” premieres on Oct 16, it’s expected that the sitcom will officially reveal the death of Roseanne. A short-lived reboot of the popular 1990s sitcom was cancelled in May after actress Roseanne Barr went on a racist Twitter rant. ABC later announced that it had ordered a spinoff of “Roseanne” and that Barr would “have no fi nancial or creative involvement in the new series.”
In the 30- second clip, Roseanne’s sister Jackie ( Laurie Metcalf) tells Roseanne’s daughter Darlene ( Sara Gilbert) that she wants to discuss “a game plan for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Darlene offers a response that sounds a lot like something Roseanne might say. “I say we follow the Conner tradition — spend every dime we have on Halloween, then we have nothing to be thankful for, or buy gifts with.”
ABC has been largely mum on details surrounding Roseanne’s purported death, though John Goodman, who plays Roseanne’s husband, Dan, revealed the character would be killed off in an August interview with the Sunday Times. Last month, Barr said in an interview with Brandon Straka, the conservative vlogger behind the #WalkAway hashtag, that her character would die of an opioid overdose.
Prior to its cancellation, the “Roseanne” reboot tackled the country’s opioid epidemic in an episode that revealed Roseanne was struggling with an addiction to prescription medication.
The sitcom’s stars also stayed silent on Roseanne’s fate in a recent interview with People, which features Metcalf, Goodman and Gilbert on its cover this week. Metcalf told the magazine that “there was a lot of risk involved” in moving forward with the spinoff but that she and her co- stars “decided as a group to take the risk, knowing that we could be judged by deciding to come back.”
And for Goodman, it was ultimately an easy decision. “There was a debt owed to this fictional family,” he said. “We want to fi nish telling this story.”