TV, both streaming and network television, is full of revivals of all your old favorite sitcoms. Unfortunately, due to the very different content landscape these days compared to the ’90s, most of them have been and gone without making too much impact.
Fuller House. The Will & Grace revival. At least Paramount Plus’ Frasier reboot is getting a second season, but it’s unlikely to reach the 11-season run of the original. And yet there’s The Conners, the Roseanne continuation that’s currently on its sixth season. ABC seems happy to keep pushing forward with the show so, who knows, maybe that one could actually match the nine-year stretch of the classic comedy, which ran from 1988 to 1997 before being briefly revived in 2018 (more on that later).
Even 100 episodes deep, The Conners isn’t running out of steam as it’s still able to dig deep into what I’m sorry that I’m about to call the Roseanne-verse. With a fan-favorite legacy character just making their grand return to the series, could Roseanne Barr/Conner ever return?
Does that The Conners‘ cameo mean Roseanne is returning?
In The Conners season 6, episode 5, Natalie West made her first appearance on the show to reprise her role as Crystal Anderson. West was an extremely regular face on the original series, appearing a total of 85 times, before a couple of appearances in 2018’s Roseanne reboot. We had no idea what happened to the Conners’ family friend until this episode, which revealed that she’d since begun suffering from a heart condition.
West’s return is naturally making fans wonder if The Conners is building up to a major return for Roseanne herself, or at least if showrunners are becoming more open to the idea of the star making a comeback. Viewers should know, though, that there has been no indication that Roseanne Barr could show up in The Conners.
The reason is that ABC is unlikely to have changed its mind on the whole controversy that lost Barr her job in the first place. Although the Roseanne revival was all set for a second season, this was immediately reversed when Barr made a disparaging tweet in May 2018 about Barack Obama’s Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett that was widely condemned as racist. ABC chairman Channing Dungey explained Barr’s firing by stating that the tweet was “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.”
At the time, it seemed Barr’s downfall would kill off the Conners family for good, before the continuation series was announced in June 2018, premiering that October. Even if ABC was to miraculously bury the hatchet with Barr, it would be difficult to bring her back as Roseanne was said to have died in The Conners‘ opening episode — initially suspected to be from a heart attack, it was ultimately confirmed the character had died from an opioid overdose.
Although considering John Goodman’s Dan was once killed off in the season 9 finale but got better, maybe we shouldn’t rule anything out.