Friday, March 27, 2015

Roseanne

Roseanne was a rather important show in that the two main characters/actors were overweight. Even today we don't see many tv shows with overweight main characters. Side characters and background characters tend to be okay, but rarely the main ones. The show started in 1988 and ended in 1997 with a total of 221 episodes over 9 seasons.


The show starts off pretty simple with a mom and dad struggling to get by. They have 3 kids, 2 girls and 1 boy. The aunt also is around pretty much all the time. As the seasons progress the daughters get boyfriends (who are brothers) Eventually stupid mistakes are made, but the family fights through it all. Some characters are introduced as side-characters that eventually become a lot stronger parts of the story as a whole. 

The biggest part of this show is the sexuality. The characters talk about sex a lot. Especially once the kids grow up enough to become sexually active themselves. Later in the series, pretty much every female character gets pregnant and have babies all over again. 

Now every show does some special stuff for their pilot, and for their finale (assuming they are allowed to finish the show and have a finale). Roseanne did some odd stuff for their final season which turned out to all be a lead up to the finale. This is some spoilers. Season 8 ends with the second daughters wedding then the dad played by John Goodman has a heart-attack. Season 9 starts with the family winning a $108 Million lottery. Season 9 is then just a series of adventures/fantasies/trips they take and do with the money or just imagine. In this season the dad almost cheats, and the Roseanne almost cheats, and all kinds of stuff like that. Honestly it was weird and didn't fully make sense. But in the last episode it turns out that all of that was just a fantasy of Roseanne as she writes novels to get by. It turns out that the dads heart-attack killed him, and Roseanne is struggling with depression from then on.

I liked the show, there was some good comic story-lines. But like many sitcoms they fell into the trap of babies everywhere. But they made it up at bit with the finale and last season. In the end I give it a 9 out of 11.