Why The Conners' Final Season Revolves Around Roseanne's Death
Roseanne returned in 2018 with an unlikely purpose. Yes, the decision to get the band back together was made in large part to reclaim the series' legacy and erase its divisive final season (and several other late-in-run storylines) from canon, but the powers that be also had another objective in mind: They were going to tackle the nation's opioid crisis — an epidemic that disproportionately impacted working class families like the Conners — head on. Viewers would soon discover that Roseanne Conner was reliant on painkillers and that she was keeping her addiction secret from her entire family, including Dan, her husband of 45 years.
By season's end, Dan learned that his wife had a problem, but he didn't necessarily have a way of fixing it. Roseanne required knee surgery, which their insurance would not cover. It was only after a natural disaster wreaked havoc on their home that they would come into enough money to schedule her operation.
Alas, when Roseanne Barr, who was warned to stay off social media, hit send on a bigoted tweet, she was removed from her own show. In turn, Roseanne Conner died of an accidental overdose; she took just enough pills to stop her breathing while she was asleep. It was a decidedly morbid turn, but one that made sense given the run of episodes that preceded it. Dan would then spend the next two seasons of the newly rebranded The Conners in mourning, unable to wrap his head around life without her. He eventually found love again, with Katey Sagal's Louise, but only after he buried his pain in a box in the back of his head — something he is loath to explain to his second wife during Wednesday's final season premiere, but he feels he has no choice. Jackie has decided that she wants to sue the pharmaceutical company responsible for Roseanne's addiction — "I'm not going to let the bastards get away with it," she proclaims — and Dan must decide if he wants to join the fight and risk opening himself up to even more suffering.
In an interview with TVLine, executive producers Bruce Helford, Bruce Rasmussen and Dave Caplan confirm that the family's lawsuit will serve as a throughline during The Conners' six-episode farewell event. The storyline, which was conceived by Helford, was inspired by the Supreme Court's decision to strip the Sackler family of immunity from opioid-related lawsuits.
"History threw this one in our laps," Helford says. It afforded them an opportunity to revisit a defining moment for these characters and bring this unforeseen chapter in their lives to a (hopefully) satisfying close.
"It's at the intersection of a lot of things that we've written about," Caplan points out. "Working class people not having the health care that they need, not having access to doctors, and having to do gig work, which is one of the reasons that the Roseanne character," who drove for Uber in Season 10, "ended up having to depend on those opioids."
But above all else, "from a character point of view, the interesting part is Dan having to dig back into all of that grief," Rasmussen says. "He knows he should do it for the family, but the price is going to be big for him."
The same goes for Jackie, who, as Caplan reminds us, suffered a nervous breakdown of sorts after she lost her sister. "We got Jackie over some big hurdles," he says. "She's happily married to Neville, she made a go of The Lunch Box, which was also important to Roseanne's legacy, and now the question is... what now? We're going to track that over the next five episodes." (And she'll do it with an assist from Jane Lynch!)
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