The Sitcom Retcon That Still Stings 29 Years Later

It has been 29 years, and the retcon at the end of this beloved sitcom remains difficult to accept. Network TV shows have had their share of rough endings over the decades. Most showrunners likely didn’t anticipate the streaming age, where their shows would be watched repeatedly and discussed endlessly.

Will & Grace, Quantum Leap, Star Trek: Enterprise, and St. Elsewhere frequently top lists of the most hated TV endings. While these endings aren’t always terrible, they sometimes feel like showrunners spitting in the faces of fans who have watched for years.

Roseanne is one of those series finales that feels deliberately designed to frustrate viewers who have been with the show since its 1988 premiere. The ABC sitcom ran for ten seasons, starring Roseanne Barr as Roseanne Conner, the matriarch of the Conner family, a working-class family in Illinois.

Roseanne and her husband Dan (John Goodman) both work and raise their three children, barely getting by on two blue-collar incomes. Roseanne was notable as one of the first American sitcoms to authentically capture what it meant to be a typical working-class family. Roseanne and Dan both work, frequently face financial hardship, and don’t look like typical sitcom leads. Throughout the series, the Conners navigated the typical problems families faced then and now. It was a successful and acclaimed show viewers could connect with, right up until the series finale.

Almost every season of Roseanne shares a similar structure, as do most sitcoms. Issues arise, jokes land, and characters come and go, but nothing substantial changes. Season 9, the last at the time, features significant changes, most notably the Conners winning a $108 million lottery and Dan having an affair.

Then, in the final episode, the entire season is wiped away, along with much of the rest of the series. The show suddenly transitions, revealing that the series is actually a book being written by the real Roseanne, based on her life. She altered much of her personal history, particularly regarding the events of the final season.

In reality, Dan died from his season 8 heart attack, and the entirety of season 9 has been Roseanne’s grief-filled musings. It’s unclear how much of the show she fabricated, considering we see other irregularities, like Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) being a lesbian all along, rather than her sister Bev (Estelle Parsons).

The episode ends on a downer note, with Roseanne explaining that writing about Dan’s infidelity was a way to express her anger at him for dying. It is as unexpected as it sounds. There was no hint this was the direction Roseanne was heading, and all these years later, it still feels like someone pointing out a mustard stain on your shirt.

This Ending Had A Major Impact On Roseanne’s Legacy

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The ending of Roseanne has had a major impact on the show’s legacy. It was an acclaimed series while on the air, but you don’t hear about it much anymore. It rarely appears in rankings of the best sitcoms of the era. When they revived the series in 2017, they had to do another retcon to disregard everything shown in that season 9 finale.

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