Roseanne - Season 9

-It took a little over a year since I started, but here I am covering the ninth and final season of the original run of Roseanne! I am still bamboozled that in the middle of doing this I found out the show was returning, and that I was able to catch up in time just a couple months before Roseanne returns to ABC on March 27. Click here to catch up on my entries covering all the prior seasons.

-I knew going into this season that I heard a lot over the years that the ‘lottery-winning’ season was the only bad season of the show and that I should have avoided it all together. Season eight had a huge cliffhanger where Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) and Dan (John Goodman) got into a huge dispute involving all kinds of broken furniture that implied their marriage was on the brink of collapse. In what was mostly a good season premiere the two overcome their huge fight and got back together by the end of the episode. However, in the closing credits scene of that episode the Connors find out they won the lottery, which is the catalyst for the worst season of the series.

-The next several episodes are absolute train wrecks! The Connors travel overseas to wine and dine with their newfound wealth in a series of gimmick episodes that I despised so much over the last couple seasons. Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) dates a detestable European prince, there is an awful wild west train heist episode, another that satires Rosemary’s Baby, an episode where Roseanne and Jackie spend at the spa that is easily the worst episode in the entire series, and a couple of episodes where they try and fit in with the wealthy and elite with their lottery winnings. This whole string of episodes is cringe-inducing throughout and saying it was a chore to get through these is a severe understatement. It got to the point I had to watch this stretch of episodes at 1.5x speed to gradually ease the pain.

-The Connors winning the lottery kind of negates the need for a job roll call since they now are filthy rich. A couple early episodes of the season take place at the Lunchbox diner before Roseanne and Jackie ultimately decide to sell their shares to Nancy (Sandra Bernhard) and Leon (Martin Mull). As a tribute to the Lunchbox, last weekend I was playing Scattegories and we rolled the letter ‘L’ and one of the categories was ‘sandwich’ so I felt it would have been a sin not to list ‘Loose-Meat’ as my sandwich of choice! Here’s hoping The Lunchbox returns in season 10!

-Darlene’s (Sara Gilbert) college situation in Chicago is never really addressed at all this season since she and David (Johnny Galecki) are expecting their child. While the Connors are overseas, their house gets renovated with decorations more fitting of their new tax bracket. It is kind of a downer actually watching this much-relatable blue-collar family transform their home into everything that went against the show’s theme all these years.

-I got the vibe the producers felt they went off the rails a bit too far nearly halfway into the season and thankfully dialed back the hokey episodes, and by the halfway point in the season them winning the lottery is almost an afterthought. Roseanne and Dan getting into another huge fight at this point in the season is when this season kind of gets somewhat back on track.

-Roseanne’s yearly Halloween special this season is easily their worst as it was the aforementioned Rosemary’s Baby knockoff that did not pan out. The Thanksgiving episode was a riot though as they have the trademark family fight at the dinner table where Bev (Estelle Parsons) comes out of the closet. Readers of these blogs will recall how bummed I am that Fred (Michael ‘O Keefe) was no longer part of the show, but I was a little relieved to see Jackie and Roseanne at least address his absence during the Christmas special stating that he found a new lady.

-Also around the halfway point of the season DJ (Michael Fishman) is given a few new takes on his character when he is revealed to be into filmmaking and a big time movie buff. He also gets his first girlfriend in the series and the two seem to hit it off by the end of the season. Good on the writers for finally giving DJ some depth….halfway into the very last season.

-Last season saw Lecy Goransen return as Becky after a few years off, but with Sarah Chalke subbing in for a few episodes as a nice gesture for her filling in for a few years. I have no idea why, but Lecy did not stick with the show for its final season so they had Chalke return again to play Becky throughout the entire season. I feel awful though because Becky is very much a background character this season even moreso compared to the previous few seasons. Becky is only in about half the episodes this season, and she only has a couple lines an episode she appears in as she is never really in a featured arc throughout the season. Becky essentially is receiving the Meg treatment on Family Guy. Her husband Mark (Glenn Quinn) is again a more featured presence throughout this season, and like the past few years is played up for comic relief throughout the season. On the season finale the two do reveal they are expecting their first kid however.

-I think I may have only addressed Roseanne’s grandma Mary (Shelley Winters), only once or twice before. Nana Mary appears only once or twice a season on average, kind of like Rose on Lost. Whenever she was on, it felt like a truly special episode where the writers made sure her appearance mattered. I was surprised they kept her character alive all these years to the point they kind of 4th-wall jest about how she is still alive. She has a great final episode in the 9th season where Mary and Bev bury the hatchet after all their years of differences. According to her Wiki, she guest-ed on a total of 10 episodes throughout her run. Winters eventually passed in 2006. Speaking of passing, I was saddened to see in my research for the show’s relaunch to find out that Glenn Quinn passed away in 2002 from a drug overdose. I saw that Mark will be re-casted for the return, but bummed to see I went this long without seeing the news.

-Even though a good chunk of this season is awful, it has one of my favorite episodes where Darlene delivers her kid two months early. Nearly everyone on the cast steps up to deliver a strong performance in this dire time for the family, with an especially powerful scene with Mark, Dan and David that I instantly re-watched a few times. Another fun episode is when Jackie and Mark get involved at the matches at a local wrestling show. It was at this point for the last several episodes of Roseanne where it is brought back down to Earth with back-to-basics storytelling and I nearly forgot they won the lottery.

-Let us touch on the controversial last episode, beware of ending spoilers in this paragraph. Darlene and David are getting setup at Roseanne’s for the interim until their kid is in full health. All the cast has an individual one-on-one with the newborn, Harris in an interesting final moment for each character. Then in an ode to the show’s opening theme where we see the cast gathering around the table for dinner all these seasons we see almost the entire cast gathering around the supper table for Chinese. Earlier in the episode DJ is moved to the basement and he references to Roseanne how they used that room for Roseanne’s writing room way back in season two.

Roseanne then goes in a voiceover during this dinner table scene saying how she has been writing ever since Dan had his heart attack and passed away the previous season. She reveals that she has been trying to cope with his death by rewriting history and essentially the final season of the show was all in Roseanne’s head. She reveals one-by-one the true fate of each cast member with Dan being dead for over a year since his heart attack, Jackie and not her mom actually being gay, and Darlene and Becky swapping spouses. It is truly a bizarre ending and definitely threw me for a loop. I was relieved to hear that ABC is pretending that final voiceover twist reveal from Roseanne never happened and that Dan will be there in full form for the re-launch in March.

-There are two bonus interviews with Roseanne Barr touching on her overall thoughts with the series and final episode. Even though the extras have been minimal to none in all prior Roseanne DVD sets I am surprised they did not interview a few other cast members for a more comprehensive final set of interviews, but I guess this is better than nothing. There is no question, the 9th and final season of Roseanne is easily the worst. Most of the first half of the season is unbelievably hard to watch, and there are a few scattered weak episodes in the second half as well. That twist ending certainly did not help either, but at least there are a few really strong episodes buried in the trenches that made it marginally worthwhile to stick with it all the way through.

-Even though this is the only season of the show I recommend to avoid, that does not take away the fact that I rank Roseanne right up there with Seinfeld as my two all-time favorite sitcoms. If I were to cherry pick the best three seasons of the show to watch, I would recommend seasons three, four and six. By season three the entire cast was clicking and Roseanne finally hit her groove with working in the mall café and having a great supporting cast with Crystal and Bonnie to bounce off of and that chemistry carried over throughout season four as well. Season six was a great redemption season for the series by bringing Becky and Mark back into the mix and David and Fred injecting new life and perfectly blending into the regular cast.

Seasons two, seven and eight are also strong seasons but having some minor hiccups from me ranking them in the same company as seasons three, four and six. Seasons one, five and nine are the weakest seasons with only season nine being the only one I recommend to avoid all together. It took about half the first season for the cast to find their groove and to finally start evolving into the characters we got to love. Season five hit a major lull after Becky and Mark left a couple episodes in and it was not until towards the end of that season that Roseanne finally started to recover from it and you can already tell from this blog why you should avoid season nine.

This was a blast reliving Roseanne for the past year. Thank you all for sticking with me throughout it, and have to re-enforce that I am flabbergasted that the show was announced to return in the middle of going through all these seasons so I am taking credit for these blogs inspiring ABC to bring Roseanne back! Rest assured, I will most likely dedicate a separate future blog covering the new season of Roseanne instead of lumping it in with all the other TV shows in my annual TV season recaps you can find in the links below. So please come back and join me in a few months for my thoughts on season 10 of America’s favorite dysfunctional family!

Past TV/Web Series Blogs

2013-14 TV Season Recap
2014-15 TV Season Recap
2015-16 TV Season Recap
2016-17 TV Season Recap
Adventures of Briscoe County Jr: The Complete Series
Angry Videogame Nerd Volumes 7-9
Mortal Kombat: Legacy - Season 1
OJ: Made in America: 30 for 30
RedvsBlue - Seasons 1-13
Roseanne – Seasons 1-9
Seinfeld Final Season
Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle
Superheroes: Pioneers of Television