December 1st, 2005
All Hail Roseanne
I recently discovered late-night reruns of “Roseanne.” I hadn’t seen the show in a while, and I had forgotten how truly remarkable it is, in its context. What other show even attempts to portray the real lives of working people? Sure, Roseanne got really weird the last few seasons, when all the money and fame went to her head, but the early seasons are priceless. It’s like going home again, but in a good way. The furniture’s old and doesn’t match, the house is kind of run-down and tacky, the girls are real people with real problems and complex relationships with each other and the adults, not just adorable props, like kids are on most sitcoms. The adults have crappy jobs that they get laid off from, their businesses fail, they run out of money and the electricity gets shut off. Or they drift from job to job without having or even seeming to aspire to anything like a “career.” And most remarkably, the problems don’t go away at the end of half an hour. The other night I caught the episode where Becky runs off to get married at 17, and I actually cried because the show did such a great job of portraying the struggles of all of the characters–the desires of Roseanne and Dan for their kids to have a better life than they had, their frustration at not being able to provide that life, their love and concern for Becky, Becky’s frustration at not having the material things and life opportunities that her middle-class friends take for granted, like a car or the chance to go to college, and her impatience for her life to start. It demonstrated how lots of times people have to learn to live with situations we don’t like and didn’t choose. It didn’t gloss over the discomfort, the awkwardness, the lack of resolution. These problems are real, problems that lots of families actually struggle with, unlike the usual sitcom fare of lovely wife, obnoxious and usually ordinary-looking husband, and flock of beautiful children living in a tastefully appointed bland interchangeable McMansion solving their hilariously light-hearted and perhaps even slightly wacky problems in 22 minutes. The only other show I know of that purports to be about working-class people is “Rodney,” and the part of one episode that I watched showed a pretty family in a pretty house whose problem du jour was that a Mexican man sneaked a ride across the border in the back of Rodney’s truck. Yeah, that happens a lot. The potential for racist “humor” made me squirm and quickly flip the channel. But “Roseanne” calls to me and sucks me in every time and makes me laugh out loud and somehow feel hopeful despite seeing this family get slammed over and over again by a system that there’s no way they can beat. If there were more shows like this, TV might actually be worth watching.
