On Television
How One Joke on "Roseanne" Explains the Show
You can't understand who you are unless you know your history. That probably goes for sitcoms, too.
By Emily Nussbaum
Currently, the reboot nods at complexity without delivering the goods.Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn
In the third episode of "Roseanne," on ABC, Roseanne Conner and her husband, Dan, wake up on their iconic sofa, in Lanford, Illinois. "It's eleven o'clock," Roseanne says. "We slept from 'Wheel' to 'Kimmel.' " Dan replies, "We missed all the shows about black and Asian families." Roseanne squawks, "They're just like us!" Then, sardonically, "There, now you're all caught up."
It would be so nice to be able to hunker down on my own sofa with "Roseanne," the blockbuster sitcom from my twenties, a feminist show that was tough about class, with pioneering gay characters and a memorably complex teen girl. It would feel good to critique the new version with a tolerant smile—to say simply that you shouldn't judge any sitcom too harshly, early on. In a review of this type, you'd emphasize the gulf between the actress Roseanne Barr, a rich, pro-Trump Twitter troll, and the character Roseanne Conner, a poor, disabled rural grandma who voted for Trump because he talked jobs. You'd point out that neither Roseanne is "Roseanne." You might praise Ames McNamara, who plays Roseanne's genderqueer grandson, Mark, or admire John Goodman, a prickly force after twenty years. You could say: lie back and think of Norman Lear.
I can't write that review, though, and it's because of zingers like the one above, dog whistles that won't let you stay inside "Roseanne." Trump comes up only in the pilot, in which Roseanne scraps with her Jill Stein-voting sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), who wears a "Nasty Woman" T-shirt and yammers like a cartoon "lib." But, after Trump fades away, his grin lingers.
Take Roseanne's joke. The jab was clearly aimed at "black-ish" and "Fresh Off the Boat," comedies that share ABC's Tuesday schedule with "Roseanne." The line establishes a few things. One is that the Conners don't live in the same America as the Johnsons, from "black-ish," or the Huangs, from "Fresh Off the Boat." There will never be a crossover episode—no fun clash, say, between an aging Jessica Huang and Roseanne, on a Conner trip to Florida. Instead, the Conners are themselves bored, alienated ABC viewers, unable even to remember titles, just that these are the "black and Asian" shows.
If you read the Hollywood trades, you might sense an unsettling frame to that joke, too: ABC is owned by Disney, which is seeking to buy Fox, a merger that could be scuttled by Trump, who has a habit of threatening media corporations that cross him. And Trump has opinions about "black-ish." When the series débuted, in 2014, he tweeted, "How is ABC Television allowed to have a show entitled 'Blackish'? Can you imagine the furor of a show, 'Whiteish'! Racism at highest level?" The month before "Roseanne" premièred, ABC pulled an episode of "black-ish": in it, Dre Johnson tells his baby son a bedtime story about race in America. Buh-leeve me, no punch line appears on ABC without getting O.K.'d all the way to the top.
Of course, Roseanne Conner didn't make the crude joke that Trump made—so far, at least, the show doesn't traffic in any heavy clash of perspectives, as in Lear's shows from the seventies, in which Maude Findlay and George Jefferson held their own against Archie Bunker. No one on "Roseanne" has used the word "racist," let alone lobbed a slur; instead, the show relies on code, such as when Roseanne snarks that Jackie might want to "take a knee," even as her black granddaughter, Mary (Jayden Ray), sits nearby, an irony no one remarks on. The missing jokes are the show's "tell": when Jackie fights Roseanne, she takes no real shots at Trump, narrowing the debate to jobs and Hillary, as if the two of them were guests on Hannity. The show's repeated theme is always that Roseanne is not that kind of Trump voter: she's sweet to Mary; she defends Mark against homophobic bullies. You might see this as complexity or as spin. If you're in a darker mood, you might call it propaganda.
So, instead of a straight shot, Roseanne and Dan take a sideways jab at their ABC slot-mates: they're old news. They're everywhere—an irritant, a snooze. But Dan couldn't be referring to any other network sitcoms about black and Asian families, because none exist. That's true even on ABC, which just a few years ago was branding itself "the diversity network," sparked by the success of Shonda Rhimes. (And, maybe, by the presence of President Obama.) "Black-ish" is the first black network family sitcom since 2006, when "The Bernie Mac Show" ended its run on Fox. "Fresh Off the Boat" is the first Asian-family show in history, not counting "All-American Girl," in 1994, which ended after one season. They're fragile phenomena. After the success of Lear and then of Bill Cosby, there were brief, exciting vogues for "ethnic comedy." But, year by year, those shows got gentrified off the comedy block, from NBC to Fox to the WB, UPN, BET. That's how change often works in mass culture: in waves that recede.
The other thing Roseanne doesn't mention is that there are two other ABC sitcoms about families "just like them": "The Middle" (which also airs on Tuesday) and "Speechless." Both shows, like "Roseanne," portray white lower-middle-class couples, weighed down by credit-card debt and living with disabled family members in messy homes they can't afford to fix. "The Middle" is currently limping toward its series finale, but it spent eight seasons delivering a smart, salty portrait of blue-collar life in Indiana. Roseanne and Dan aren't watching "The Middle," however. They don't make a meta-joke about how it was created by two writers who worked on the original "Roseanne." "The Middle" can't exist if "Roseanne" wants to strike that primal chord of white resentment: that more (or any!) black or brown faces mean less room for white people. This useful amnesia is also what enabled ABC to use the slogan "A Family That Looks Like Us" when selling "Roseanne" to advertisers, a dog whistle so strong that it might have brought Lassie back from the dead.
Roseanne's crack that "they're just like us!" has a historical context, too. It's an allusion to the bland family sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, when syrupy, anti-racist "very special episodes" dominated prime-time comedy (think "Family Ties"), treating color blindness as a virtue. In 1988, "Roseanne" helped puncture that formula, and with it the liberal fantasy that bigotry was just a misunderstanding that might be fixed by the credits.
Roseanne's joke makes no sense, though. The ABC Tuesday-night "black and Asian" family sitcoms aren't "they're just like us!" stories: to the contrary, they're downright gonzo in their cultural specificity, spiked with in-jokes. Ironically, these are the shows that most directly carry on the legacy of the original, deeply autobiographical "Roseanne," which was a truth serum in a medium devoted to reassuring lies. Kenya Barris's "black-ish" is just as personal, and, often, as unsettling, a show: it's a raucous series about a class-hopping African-American dad uncomfortable in his bougie family, a story drawn from its creator's life. "Fresh Off the Boat," whose showrunner is the Persian-American Nahnatchka Khan, is a dizzy retro experiment adapted from Eddie Huang's memoir about a hip-hop-obsessed child of Taiwanese immigrant strivers. Both shows mine their best comedy from difference, not sameness: Asian immigrants who take pride in the gulf between them and their neighbors; a black man so anxious about a white neighbor knowing he can't swim that he nearly drowns. On both shows, family love, however relatable, doesn't exist in a political vacuum. As Dre Johnson and Jessica Huang continually warn their children, you can't understand who you are unless you know your history. That probably goes for sitcoms, too.
After the new "Roseanne" débuted, to impressive numbers, Trump—notorious for lying about the ratings of "The Apprentice"—called Barr to congratulate her. But, in "Roseanne" 's case, the ratings were real, which made sense: aside from nostalgia, there's a powerful appeal to any project that reassures Fox viewers without alienating the MSNBC crowd.
The show offers a clever finger trap for critics. Call a hit dangerous and you imply that it's really quite sexy. And, in fact, the seventh episode, which I won't spoil, pulls a daring switcheroo, one that may offer a new lens through which to interpret Roseanne's behavior. It's not enough. The reboot nods at complexity without delivering—there are good people on many sides, on many sides. If you squint, you might see the show's true hero as Darlene (Sara Gilbert), a broke single mom forced to move in with that charismatic bully Roseanne. But, if that were so, we might understand Darlene's politics, too. We'd more fully feel her pain and also that of her two kids, transplanted to a place they find foreign and unwelcoming.
Instead, Roseanne's cackling drowns these stories out—that's what star power is. In the third episode, Darlene's daughter, Harris (Emma Kenney), hogs the dryer. She has her reasons, we learn: she is so desperate to go back to Chicago that she's dealing shoplifted clothing. But we're encouraged to see her through her grandmother's eyes, as a spoiled urban brat. When Roseanne calls Harris "an entitled little bitch," Harris calls her "a stupid old hillbilly." Then Roseanne tricks her granddaughter into cleaning a plate, and, when she does, Roseanne shoves Harris's head into the sink, hard, then sprays her, saying, "Welcome to the hillbilly day spa."
The crowd goes wild. It's Boomers versus Gen Y—catharsis with a pro-wrestling jolt. (In between conspiracy theories, Roseanne tweeted "watch how I handle her and her very liberal mother!") But would a Chicago teen-ager call her MAGA grandma a "hillbilly," musty slang from another era? No way: she'd call her a bigot, an asshole, or maybe, if things got heated, a slur with its own nasty history, "white trash." That might make it an uglier confrontation, for sure. But a fair fight is one that reveals the truth. ♦
Published in the print edition of the April 23, 2018, issue, with the headline "White-ish."
Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker's television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Her anthology, "I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution," was released in June.
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