Today in History: Roseanne premieres on ABC

For most people, comedian Roseanne Barr was an unknown person when this show, which was incredibly similar to other shows took the sitcom world by storm. I had kind of heard of John Goodman, but everyone else in the show was an unknown to me and most other people. It would go on to become one of the most successful sitcoms of all time.

The year was 1988

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The show's underlying premise was not anything particularly novel. The Conners are a working-class family struggling with normal things in life such as paying bills and just living life. Their house was spartan and they didn't really aspire to have the "finer things in life."

Roseanne Barr already had a successful career as a stand-up comedian and she was approached by ABC because they had an idea for a show where both parents work, and they needed a woman to be the lead because believe it or not, that was still not so usual in the late 80's. Women, even women in what was considered progressive shows, were normally just an extension of the "man of the family."

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Roseanne's domineering attitude during her stand-up sketches was perfect for such a role. ABC also wanted to have characters that weren't particularly stunning to look at, if you know what I mean. The Conner parents, played by Roseanne and John Goodman, were rather fat but their size was almost never the butt of the jokes on the show. As sad as this sounds, there is and was a very large portion of the American audience that are also overweight, and this may also explain part of the appeal.

The show premiered today in 1988 and by the time the 2nd season started in 1989 it had become the most widely-watched show on television, bringing in around 20 million viewers per episode. The show carried on for another 8 years, slowly losing traction until it was cancelled in 1997.

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Roseanne started a revival in 2018 and managed, once again, to quickly become one of the most-watched shows on TV despite having substantially fewer viewers (this is because people generally don't watch network television anymore.) That would all change when Roseanne made a disparaging comment about a politician and of course the TV world over-reacted.

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In a drunken tweet Roseanne managed to dismantle the show when she said that a former Obama staffer had a resemblance to one of the major ape characters from the original movies. Was it in bad taste? Sure. However, there is no denying that the backlash was far more extreme on Roseanne because she is a well-known political conservative. ABC must have taken it very seriously, because it isn't every day that a business will take one of their top-selling products off the shelf because of a Tweet.

They re-worked the show and renamed it "The Conners" and the show carried on without Barr. However, it became very evident very quickly that without Roseanne, the show really isn't the same. It saw diminished viewership after the initial hype wore off. However, it is still in production to this day.

I can't say exactly what makes the success of this show so special but I believe it has something to do with the fact that they took something that at least on paper, seems like it would be incredibly mundane and made it a laugh riot. I don't know how much the jokes would stand up today, but it is like stepping back in time if you watch one or two of the early episodes. Things have changed a lot in the past 30 years.