The Conners: Jackie's Wedding Acknowledged Roseanne’s Legacy (Unlike Dan)

2022-05-20 22:22:55 By : Aurora qin

Unlike Dan, Jackie and Darlene discussed Roseanne on their wedding day, proving that The Conners getting better at acknowledging her legacy.

While Dan’s wedding on The Conners featured no mention of Roseanne or its titular character, season 4’s finale fixed this by bringing up the show’s former protagonist in the lead-up to Darlene and Jackie’s double wedding. The Conners has always had a complicated relationship with Roseanne. The sitcom spinoff came into existence when Roseanne star Roseanne Barr was fired from the show in 2018 due to racist remarks on Twitter, prompting the network to retool Roseanne into The Conners by killing off the character Roseanne via an off-screen opioid overdose.

Since then, the Conner family has rarely mentioned their deceased matriarch, most likely because The Conners wants to avoid reminding viewers of the earlier series. This has sometimes felt awkward and forced, as was infamously the case when Roseanne’s widow Dan re-married and not one family member mentioned his late wife during the ceremony. However, although The Conners season 4 finale didn’t bring back Grandma Beverly or many other Roseanne characters, the episode did make up for this earlier misstep with one heartfelt conversation.

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At the start of season 4, Dan’s wedding episode featured no mention of Roseanne. This was an odd, jarring choice since Roseanne was Dan’s first wife and only died a few seasons earlier, making it bizarre that he (and her children) didn’t even reference her memory in passing on the big day. What made the problem even more obvious was the fact that Roseanne’s sister Jackie officiated Dan’s second wedding. This led to a lot of debate online over how The Conners should ideally handle the character of Roseanne’s legacy as the show’s former protagonist, and evidently, The Conners creators took this criticism on board. In The Conners season 4, episode 20, “A Judge and A Priest Walk Into A Living Room…”, after Harris and Aldo’s breakup-spawning fight makes the triple wedding a double wedding again, Jackie and Darlene talk about their late sister and mother, respectively. Jackie tells Darlene that she felt Roseanne would be with them in spirit on the day, which was appropriately sentimental without feeling schmaltzy.

Of all the Conners clan, Jackie is one of the more emotionally open characters. While undeniably kooky and often hot-headed, Roseanne’s sister has always worn her heart on her sleeve which made it both believable and poignant that she was the one to mention Roseanne rather than the more reserved, sardonic Darlene. Darlene’s moved response and the pair’s decision that they needed to make the wedding perfect for the sake of Roseanne’s memory mostly made up for The Conners season 4 forgetting Jackie’s romance until Neville proposed and dismissing Roseanne’s legacy during Dan’s earlier wedding.

While it was ill-judged for Dan’s wedding to feature no mention of Roseanne, the choice did make more sense since Dan has always been less open about his feelings than Jackie. The episode’s failure to mention the late character also prompted The Conners season 4 to address Roseanne’s death and its impact more than the spinoff has since season 1, which was set in the immediate aftermath of the event. This is positive growth for the Roseanne follow-up as it proves that The Conners is no longer afraid of addressing Roseanne’s complicated legacy and acknowledging the character’s impact on the show.

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Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.