Working Mom

Season One -- pic courtesy of ABC
by blogSpotter

The late 1980’s gave Americans some television that told it like it is, with over-the-top satire. The Bundies on Married With Children gave us Peg the housewife and Al the put-upon shoe salesman. Their teen kids were dull (but cute) slackers before slacker was the word du jour. The Simpsons was a cartoon series giving us insight into the loud, buffoonish Homer, long-suffering wife Marge, brat Bart (a deliberate anagram?), nerd Lisa and infant Maggie. Both of these shows steered miles away from the saccharine, dumbed-down formula ‘80’s shows like Charles in Charge or Mr. Belvedere.

Clever as these new shows were, they didn’t have the heart and earnest passion of Roseanne, another new show of the era which sought to give us a similar family dysfunction in a style that was pragmatic and realistic – not especially campy or silly. Roseanne centered on the working class Conner family in the fictional town of Lanford, Illinois. The show gave us Roseanne and Dan Conner – stout, working parents raising two teenage girls and a little boy. The show leveraged off the feminist, in-your-face stand-up comedy Roseanne had already made her trademark. Many women liked the show because it showed women (most notably Roseanne and her sister Jackie) matching male bravado with their own brand of female bravado. The message was welcomed and empowering at the time.

Overall, in the first three seasons, Roseanne dealt with some fairly common issues – coming of age, economic need, aging and other typical family topics. The personalities portrayed were at turns sweet, believable, feisty and honest. I watched the show regularly myself and could understand its high ranking in the Nielson top 10. I especially enjoyed watching the tomboyish Darlene evolve into a hilariously witty, Goth-looking young adult.

But (you saw it coming), Roseanne became a victim of its own success midway thru the series. Roseanne the actress began a relationship with actor-comedian Tom Arnold, and started reshaping her face with plastic surgery. Our pleasant, jocular Lanford Mom started to more resemble a pouty lipped Elvira with blue-black hair. The show became a “cool” venue for established actor cameos and so we had strangely convoluted plotlines to accommodate the likes of Joan Collins, Tim Curry and Shelley Winters.

Worst of all, the show seemed to become Roseanne’s chosen venue for exploring and working out her personal issues – the kind of issues others might take to a private analysis session. The actress in real life was “recovering” memories of parent-child abuse, a concept which I find as questionable now as then. She let those types of topics and attitudes seep into the show; her TV mom played by Estelle Parsons was vilified as a witch from beyond the pale. Every male on the show was a castrati, recipient to Roseanne’s withering put-downs. Where the first seasons had nuance and thoughtfulness, the later seasons became a battle of the sexes enlarged into a paranoid battle of Roseanne versus the world.

Her relationship with Tom Arnold started to deteriorate at which point the show itself imploded. Tabloids regularly ran stories about the terrors of the Roseanne set. In its 8th and 9th seasons, the show “jumped the shark” so spectacularly that you might not even recognize the characters or the backdrop from the 1st couple of seasons. My overall impression, as I wind down on this “forensic review” is that TV projects do better as a cooperative venture and not as a bully pulpit for egomaniacal stars. Many other TV shows have taken strange turns or run out gas – Roseanne would’ve been well served to run out of gas a lot sooner than it did.

© 2012 blogSpotter