Season 9 of “Roseanne:” is one of the most jarring shifts in narrative tone and series concepts I’ve ever seen. Throughout the entire series we’re told time and time again that Dan and Roseanne are humongous fans of two shows: Bonanza and The Beverly Hillbillies. Someone thought it’d be a great idea if the final season of “Roseanne” took off from “The Beverly Hillbillies,” thus betraying every sensibility the show once had. Season 9 is an unwatchable calamity of nonsense.
It varies from really bad comedy to really awful melodrama, and paints its originally lovable characters as parodies of themselves. The once subtly dumb Mark is now a complete and total buffoon, Becky is utterly irrelevant in the skin of the poorly underused Sarah Chalke, DJ is given a boring love interest and suddenly wants to become a filmmaker, and all of the supporting characters are completely idiotic offering no laughs.
In season 9, The Connors as well as Jackie, inexplicably become millionaires and win the lottery. If that’s not enough, the show takes a spiral downward, completely destroying any genuine commentary it had about the human condition and living life on the brink of financial ruins to provide The Connors and sister Jackie with endless adventures for the final season, all of which are utterly unwatchable. Dan’s heart problems become a non-entity, especially once John Goodman left the show for at least sixty percent of the final season to have heart surgery and pursue roles in other projects. So as the Connors become millionaires, Dan leaves and the show focuses primarily on the adventures of Roseanne and Jackie, and how they deal with wealth.
Completely forgetting that Dan and Roseanne’s dynamic is what made the show so entertaining in the first place. Roseanne also betrays her original intent for the character by turning Roseanne in to a socialite who makes it her mission to become slim and ends up appearing at fancy parties and hobnobbing with rich people, she who in one episode made a star of herself bashing the slim actresses of “Friends.” She who made being heavy something worth appreciating. Now she just does nothing but focuses on superficial traits, and Roseanne is no longer a character we can connect with. If that’s not enough the show doesn’t even portray living as a millionaire as a down to Earth experience where Dan and Roseanne learn the meaning of spending, saving, and appreciating life. The show dives head first in to ridiculous plots to compensate the lack of John Goodman.
So Jackie is romanced by a European prince (played by Jim Varney!), Roseanne is romanced by a rich executive who finds her irresistible (played by James Brolin), Jackie and Roseanne enter a health spa coming across a bunch of pseudo-celebrities, they make friends with a rich family who find the Connors entertaining, and Roseanne is approached by studio executives who want to turn her life in to a TV movie. I’m sure Roseanne herself felt this episode would be a cute callback to her days of developing the original show, but it’s just an endless stream of self-indulgent nonsense, each episode suffering from the lack of John Goodman to bounce jokes off of Roseanne. Every episode of season nine is unwatchable, and insufferable, with one episode featuring Roseanne fighting terrorists on a moving train, and of course the final half.
The writers shift the tone wildly by turning to melodrama, relinquishing any and all laughs from the series. When Dan finally returns to the series, Jackie discovers he’s been having an affair on Roseanne, and Dan is unsure if he wants to stay married to Roseanne. This is the character who spends most of the early seasons clinging to Roseanne loyally, and doing whatever it takes to make her happy. To boot, Darlene has her child with David and it may or may not survive long enough, thus there are at least two episodes devoted to the characters whimpering, crying, sulking, and sobbing all without their usual snarky humor they once used to combat their misery and woe. Roseanne, over the course of the series really reflected her growing self esteem and egomania with every passing season.
Roseanne begins the series as a stout everyday worker struggling to catch up with life, then becomes a wily and sassy woman who gives men a run for their money, soon once Roseanne herself garnered a ton of plastic surgery the character of Roseanne became shrill, manipulative and domineering but was loved by literally everyone she came across no matter how obnoxious she was. Worst of all, by the end of the show Roseanne turned herself in to God. In one of the most controversial TV series finales of all time that still makes fans of the series groan, the show ends on a throwback to the opening credits where Roseanne explains what happened to the characters, and suddenly we find out that not only was the shocking lottery win nothing but fantasies concocted by Roseanne, but about eighty percent of everything we ever saw on the series was completely made up by Roseanne the character.
In other words, Roseanne the actress turns herself in to God by the end of the series. I suspect the show’s immense back pedaling in the final episode was Roseanne’s realization that she’d have to leave some groundwork for a potential reunion show in the future, so Roseanne and the writers turned the character in to a meta-God, who conceived everything we ever saw on the series. To add insult to injury we learn Dan actually died shortly after having a heart attack at Darlene’s wedding, hence why he’s barely in season nine. Dan’s incredibly insulting and out of character move of cheating on Roseanne? Oh, Just Roseanne’s feelings of abandonment by Dan’s sudden death. The awful episodes involving princes, spas, celebrities, and Roseanne being a superhero? Just Roseanne’s attempts to cope with being a widow by creating these wild fantasies. The series finale is just an abomination, a painful amalgam of back pedaling, terrible meta-storytelling, and a final insult to the loyal viewers who invested nine years in watching a show the lead actress informs us actually never happened. What a god awful way to reward your fans for watching.