ABC’s ‘The Conners’ without Roseanne Barr is a triumph

Facebook revs up reality TV

Can there be a “Roseanne” without Roseanne? The answer is yes, indeed. There can even be a pretty good sitcom. And you might not miss her that much.

ABC on Tuesday night aired the first episode of “The Conners,” a spinoff of “Roseanne” without Roseanne Barr. An overdose of pain pills may be the explanation for the contentious comedian’s absence from the Conner dining table, but she still haunts it, at least in the new show’s pilot.

The writers - Bruce Helford, Bruce Rasmussen and Dave Caplan - have done an absolutely masterful job of tackling a post-Barr world, confronting sadness, cynicism and hopefulness in just the right amount of proportions.

They’ve accomplished that without the main reason people once tuned in. Barr was the show’s gravitational pull, the hurler of barbs in that accusatory, whiny voice. Leaving her behind is akin to taking Neil Patrick Harris out of “How I Met Your Mother” or airing “Star Trek” without William Shatner.

But in the absence of Barr’s acerbic black hole, the trio of Dan Goodman, Laurie Metcalf and Sara Gilbert raises its acting games, turning the first episode into something like a one-act play, albeit a comedy written by Arthur Miller.

The pilot begins three weeks after Roseanne’s funeral, with the family still coming to grips with its loss in its own trademark way with off-color barbs. “I’m tired of crying. And laughing inappropriately is what mom taught us to do,” Lecy Goranson’s Becky says. When husband Dan is offered a free sympathy beer at a bar, he successfully upgrades it from domestic to German.

Goodman has never been better, showing his tender and angry sides underneath all that bluster and gruff, while an aching Gilbert tears up at one point, freed from her usual rat-a-tat joke demands. And you can feel Metcalf’s yawning grief at the loss of her sister in a visceral way as she goes on a manic cleaning binge. “I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to leave this house because I don’t want to leave her,” she wails.

We learn that Roseanne had multiple painpill suppliers and was stashing stockpiles all over the house. “Who am I supposed to be mad at now?” Dan asks. For his part, Dan also starts to deal with his uncomfortableness with homosexuality, in the end sitting down with his gender non-conforming grandson to help him pick a potential boyfriend.

One thing noticeably absent from the first episode: politics. There’s no Trump, no Hillary, no Washington. The fission of red state-versusblue state infighting that made the reboot of “Roseanne” such a flashpoint is gone. Viewers are left with a blue-collar family worried about bill collectors and military deployments.

Barr’s absence makes sense since her addiction to opioids was a prominent story line in last season’s reboot. ABC fired Barr from “Roseanne” after she posted a racist tweet (she apologized). Barr said she agreed to the spinoff to save the jobs of 200 cast and crew members who were idled when “Roseanne” was canceled.

“Roseanne” was always masterful at quickly popping its own moments of emotional sweetness with a wry, sardonic needle, basically and gleefully mocking the traditional sitcom formula. Thankfully, “The Conners” stays in that tradition.

When Jackie, who in one scene is putting away kitchen tools, tearfully hugs Darlene in the kitchen, the younger woman admits: “It hurts.” Jackie responds: “I know, hon. It’s going to hurt for quite a while.”

“No,” replies Darlene, “Corn holders in my shoulder.”

The first episode artfully mixes boob jokes and poignant scenes, as when Dan silently hugs the empty space in the bed where his wife once lay. The swirling credits and harmonica theme song that plays when family members gather around the kitchen table now comes at the end, and without Barr’s throaty laugh.

The cast seems to reference the elephant in the room when Dan and Darlene toast Roseanne’s stubbornness. “She was gonna to do what she was gonna do,” Goodman says. “She never listened to a damn person in her life.”

With her polarizing presence gone, we can finally listen to the rest of the family. And maybe we might, one day, ask, “Roseanne, who?”

CANNES, France:

Also:

Facebook said Wednesday it was reviving the pioneering MTV reality show “The Real World” as its secret weapon to lure viewers away from YouTube.

The social media giant said it was also trying to harness the formidable online power of the “cute kitten” factor with a new show called “World’s Most Amazing Dog” on its new Facebook Watch platform.

Users who think their pooch is cute enough to be a contender can enter audition videos from their phones, it told TV executives at MIPCOM in Cannes, the world’s top entertainment showcase.

The company’s head of video Paresh Rajwat said Facebook Watch – which began to be rolled out in the US last year – was now available across the world, with “the time people spend on it increasing by 14 times since”.

“The Real World” was one of the first “social experiment” TV reality shows when it aired in 1992, spawning others like “Big Brother”.

LOS ANGELES:

As science fiction, and dystopian cyberpunk in particular, surge in mainstream popularity - see “Blade Runner 2049,” “Dredd” or the upcoming “Alita: Battle Angel” - a question often asked is: Can this genre be adapted for younger audiences?

A possible answer might be that yes, and animation is the perfect medium with which to do so.

Portugal’s Animais, a company best-known for its award-winning animated short films, has a possible answer of their own. The company behind “Between the Shadows,” which pitched at Annecy before winning the Arte France Prize in 2016 and making it to the final cut of 12 films short-listed for that year’s Cesar Awards, is working on their first series, the 3D animated “7 Boxes,” which takes place in a rainy, neon-lit city which will be familiar to cyberpunk fans.

Pitched at Spain’s 3D Wire, an increasingly important Iberian and European animation festival held in Segovia each year, “7 Boxes” is a seven-episode 3D animated series meant for and set in a world of kids.

“We had this idea to develop a series around the subject of technology. The idea was to put into perspective how technology changed or affected how children relate to each other and to their parents when they are almost, or at least a lot of the time, connected to their smart phones, laptops and smart TVs, connected to screens,” director Davide Freitas explained at 3D Wire.