Roseanne was back! But would they screw it up? When I learned that ABC would reboot the show and ignore Dan’s (John Goodman) death in the original’s final season, I felt both trepidation and elation. More or less contemporaneous with Friends and Seinfeld, two other iconic comedies, the show was grounded in a working-class, dysfunctional-family dynamic that distinguished it from Friends’ whitewashed, fantastically affordable New York and Seinfeld’s absurdism. The original show (1988-1997) is one of my favorite sitcoms. On Tuesday, March 27 , the reboot of the ABC television sitcom Roseanne debuted to 18.2 million viewers. Roseanne Connor is willing to threaten an entire class of elementary-school children, in public, for Mark’s sake, yet she voted for, and still defends, a politician who would invalidate Mark as a full American citizen.
