Leaving aside the grubby root of the issue, or Roseanne Barr’s rampant determination to keep making it worse, the cancellation of Roseanne has left one hell of a mess.
A career is over, seemingly for ever. A television network is tens of millions of dollars out of pocket. A cast and crew are suddenly unemployed. The Roseanne writers, who started work on a new series the day the show was cancelled, are likely to be out of work and uncompensated for the season. It is, by all accounts, a terrible state of affairs.
There are rumours that Roseanne may be snapped up, a la Brooklyn Nine-Nine, by a rightwing streaming startup founded by a former Trump campaign aide, but that does not seem likely. At this point, the show is so toxic that it is hard to imagine anyone but Barr wanting to taint their reputation by associating with it. Roseanne is dead – and it is going to stay dead.
But this is 2018, baby. Just because something is dead does not mean that we cannot fix up the corpse a little. When Kevin Spacey’s career went down in flames, House of Cards moved on without him. When Jeffrey Tambor self-destructed, Transparent sliced him out and carried on. Admittedly, this instance is muddied by the fact that Roseanne is named after Barr – it is hard to believe that House of Cards would have carried on had it been called Kevin Spacey in Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards – but a shift of focus may be feasible.
Already, Mindy Kaling has offered to write a new show for John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf, although you suspect that every writer on the planet would leap at the chance to do something similar, while Lena Dunham has proposed a Roseanne spin-off “starring Darlene’s cool kids”.
I would be interested to see a show about DJ, a character who crawled out from underneath the wreckage of the Conner family in the revival and managed to become a normal, easygoing paternal figure like his father. A DJ Conner spin-off would be essentially Dan Conner: The Early Years, but without the enormous salary budget for John Goodman.
Another easy win would be to refocus on Roseanne’s daughter Darlene. Sara Gilbert reportedly did a lot of the legwork to get Roseanne revived in the first place and we have been trained to watch Roseanne through her eyes, so a spin-off about her own family seems sensible. They could even throw in hints of Frasier, surrounding Darlene with people who are even more like Darlene to turn her into a lead character.
What I am holding out for, though, is The Two Beckys, where Lecy Goranson and her sometime replacement Sarah Chalke are struck by lightning and end up living in the same house as two versions of the same character. Imagine the wacky hijinks. Goranson’s date ends up sleeping with Chalke by mistake. Chalke plays hooky and sends Goranson to work in her place. Goranson gets a stomach bug and Chalke ends up vomiting everywhere. These stories practically write themselves.
The truth is that whatever ABC decides will not be beyond the realms of possibility. After all, Roseanne is a programme about a working-class family who struggle through life and then win the lottery, except they do not, because that entire series was written off as a dream sequence brought on by the trauma of Dan’s sudden death, which also did not happen, because he was miraculously revived for the new series. It was always such a messy show, packed with loose ends and go-nowhere ideas that burst on impact, that anyone could unpick it and find a decent new series to make.
Which is not to say that they should, of course. In fact, they absolutely should not. Roseanne has caused such a noxious stink that the whole thing should be cemented up, buried and abandoned for centuries, like a broken nuclear reactor. We will all be much better off if we move on from this without another word.
