The Conners Series Finale: EPs Reflect On Roseanne's Absence, Fourth Wall Break And Parallels To Original Ending

After a combined 17 seasons — and a whopping 343 episodes — The Conners have, once and for all, gone off into that good night. And they did so without an assist from their former star.

To be clear, a cameo by Roseanne Barr was never in the cards. Barr burned that bridge when she hit send on a bigoted tweet that nearly took everybody down with her. But the beloved series, not unlike the working-class family at its center, persevered, and The Conners would run an astounding seven seasons, cementing its status as TV's most successful sitcom revival.

When I ask executive producers Bruce Helford, Bruce Rasmussen and Dave Caplan if they ever, even for a second, considered having Roseanne Barr in the finale, Helford is quick to remind me, "We pulled a Newhart the first time!" He's referring to 2018's Roseanne revival, which kicked off with the resurrection of John Goodman's Dan Conner, who was killed off in the original series' 1997 finale. To do it again, this time with Dan's late wife, "would have felt to us like a rug pull," Rasmussen says.

According to Helford, the only conversation they ever had was about preserving the character's memory, "and we felt we did that. People loved her, her family loved her, and we wanted to make sure that this was something that honored that."

Adds Caplan: "We never ran away from, or disrespected her character. That was a conscious decision on all our parts."

Ultimately, Wednesday's hour-long sendoff saw Dan go up against the pharmaceutical company responsible for his late wife's opioid addiction. And while he didn't walk away with a $108 million check, he did walk away with a sense of closure.

Later on, Dan, along with Darlene (Sara Gilbert), Becky (Lecy Goranson) and Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), visited Roseanne's grave with their respective spouses — all of whom came into their lives after her fatal overdose — and assured her that she could rest easy; life for all of them had turned out OK.

Below, Helford, Rasmussen and Caplan reflect on the decision to stick Dan with a measly settlement, the fates of each legacy character, and the decision to have John Goodman break the fourth wall and address the audience at the end of the show.

TVLINE | You previously told me that The Conners would never win the lottery, and they would never be rich again. So I take it there was never any discussion of Dan receiving more than $700 from the pharmaceutical company?
HELFORD | No. Even the idea of landing on $700, it was like, "What”s a small enough amount of money that doesn't seem completely ridiculous?" [Laughs]
CAPLAN | That was a negotiation. We wanted it to be just enough where they could blow it in one fell swoop on something silly. They ended up having a pizza party, which was nice. Maybe you can't spend $700 at Domino's, but it had to be insignificant enough that we know that the little guy doesn't ever win, really.
HELFORD | Yeah. We wanted it to be much more bitter than sweet. Also, we started this entire reboot because we wanted to get rid of that stupid lottery, so we weren't going to revisit that. No. Never in our thoughts. [Laughs]
RASMUSSEN | All the characters were already where we wanted them. We wanted them to be on an upswing. The money was a secondary thing. If their lives were going well [that was enough].
CAPLAN | And the fact that we left them where we left them, with the implication that they were all going to do OK financially.
HELFORD | Right. That was it.

TVLINE | The original series closed on an overhead shot of Roseanne sitting all by herself. This time around, it's Dan sitting all by himself — but instead of leaving it there, John Goodman breaks the fourth wall, says "goodnight," then gets up and walks into the bedroom. How did you land on that ending?
RASMUSSEN | That happened during the shoot — that he breaks the fourth wall.
HELFORD | Yeah. We'd actually already broken the fourth wall with all the crying because that was real. They were saying goodbye forever. That's not [how] you'd normally [react] after a pizza party if you're going to see these people the next day, but we felt that it was really significant to break the fourth wall and let the audience see what they were truly feeling.
CAPLAN | We also were very self-conscious about not doing a cloying last sitcom episode. It was John's suggestion that he thank the audience like that, and it felt so authentic and honest. It felt like an anti-sitcom episode, and we ended up really liking that.

TVLINE | If John came up with the idea to address the audience during the shoot, how was that last scene originally supposed to end?
RASMUSSEN | He said goodnight, but he said it to [the other characters].
HELFORD | Yeah, he said goodnight to them.
RASMUSSEN | But they had already sort of left [as he was saying it] because we wanted to have him solo... but we didn't expect it to get that emotional.
HELFORD | When Laurie said goodnight, there was nothing [scripted] about saying goodbye to each other that way. When she went to the door, she chose to pause and do that, and it broke everybody. They realized she was saying goodbye forever, and so they all responded in that way.
CAPLAN | We realized that it didn't make a lot of sense in that particular story, but it was just so honest and so human. It was kind of irresistible to us to leave it in.

TVLINE | The Roseanne revival opened with a shot of that iconic couch, and we end The Conners with a shot of that iconic couch. Were those bookends intentional?
HELFORD | Yeah, and the couch is always intentional — it was intentional [at the] very beginning of the reboot. That couch is so iconic, and to me it represents the couch the audience sits on to watch the show. It's like, "Our couch is your couch." And then there was a debate on how long to [linger] on the couch alone. We were gonna [stay on it] at one point, I think, for 40 seconds, but then we decided that it would be great to show flashbacks to give [those final moments] some scope — seeing that, you know, Sara and Lecy literally grew up on that show. We thought that would be meaningful for people. It's a legacy closer as opposed to a series closer.
RASMUSSEN | Helford and I started out together on this journey [during Season 5 of Roseanne], so we thought we'd end it there [with a scene of Sara and Lecy from Season 5, Episode 2].
HELFORD | And Dave was there a season before us, I believe.
CAPLAN | Yeah, a little before you guys.

TVLINE | When we spoke at the end of Season 6, you said Darlene was at a crossroads. She would have to decide whether she was going to pursue a career she was passionate about, or whether she was just going to accept a job that provides for her family. Since we didn't see her explore her passion for writing this season, are we to assume she'd accepted that a writing career just wasn't in the cards?
HELFORD | [In Season 6] she made the noble sacrifice of staying in the job at the college cafeteria in order for Mark to go to school. Once he decided in the second-to-last episode [to leave college and move to New York City to partake in an IT training program], then it was really [about] whether she was going to go out and start challenging the world again, and we thought, "No, it doesn't feel honest at this stage." But we did want to have a hurdle for her, and when Ben said, "I want to go and have my career," then it became a question of, "What's going to happen to her? When one person is chasing a dream and the other isn't, do you end up leaving them behind or ignoring them?" The Seth Green character was never meant to be a romantic interest... and it finally came to light for Ben what was going on.

TVLINE | I'm glad you mentioned that. I was pleased that Chad wasn't just a stand-in for David. We've seen that love triangle before. Would you say Darlene and Ben are on solid footing now?
CAPLAN | I think they definitely are. [When] families are struggling to make ends meet, it's incredibly hard on relationships. We watched — first, Dan and Roseanne, and then to a lesser degree, Dan and Louise — navigate that stuff, and we just wanted to throw a bit of a question mark into the Darlene and Ben of it all. Ben was hellbent [on having the hardware magazine]. Would it tear them apart? There was a moment where it didn't look good, but ultimately they're going to [stay] together in the same way that our other couples have.

TVLINE | Now that Becky has graduated and has a decent-paying job, she and Tyler decide to commingle their finances. But did you ever consider something more monumental for the couple — like buying a home or getting engaged?
HELFORD | Lecy said, "Please don't get me married."
RASMUSSEN | Yeah, she did not want [Becky] to get married. We had done so many marriages on this show.
HELFORD | It just seemed so easy.
RASMUSSEN | Right. We just wanted her to be the Becky we knew from the beginning. The smart girl finally got back — after all the s—t she'd been through — to who she really was.
CAPLAN | We were kind of sensitive about her victory at the end of all this being a man. We wanted it to be her. She battled her demons, came out the other side and became who she was meant to be all along. That felt more satisfying than a relationship [milestone].
RASMUSSEN | And she found a really sweet, supportive, secure guy.

TVLINE | We knew Michael Fishman wouldn't be back. But why no mention of DJ or his family in the series finale?
HELFORD | I know we had expressed, maybe the season before, that he had gone to Germany to be with his wife and his kid. They joined her over there. So that was the last mention of him. But it didn't seem necessary to bring anything further up. We felt like the audience knows what's going on.
RASMUSSEN | It also felt weird to bring him up and not have him in the show.

TVLINE | Thirty-five years later, Jackie is a cop again. But this isn't the same Jackie from Roseanne. She's older, she's kookier... even she has said that she probably has some sort of undiagnosed mental illness. Should we be worried about her well being?
HELFORD | If there was anything to follow beyond this show, it would be Jackie rejoining the force. Yeah, I would be concerned for her! [Laughs] Having said that, she passed the physical. And we said, "What does she always talk about most? What has she expressed a love for most of all the things she's done before?" She'd been through a lot of different careers [but] she always referenced being a cop, and it meant a lot to her. We felt like that was a win for her.
CAPLAN | She got a do-over for something in her life that didn't work out the way she wanted it to [the first time around], and instead of going to her grave with regrets, she actually got to fix it. That's a fantasy for a lot of people.
RASMUSSEN | And she got to say to Roseanne, "I did it!"

TVLINE | Dan might've lost the love of his life, but he has Louise, who loves him deeply, and a family that will never leave his side. Do you think he has found some semblance of peace by the end of this chapter?
RASMUSSEN | Yes.
HELFORD | I think he [finds it] at the grave. He says — because that's kind of a quote from the original Roseanne — "We always said if the kids were alive at the end of the day, we did our job. I think we've done better than that." I think that's his acceptance and understanding that he actually has been a great dad. He realizes he created these three beings who can handle themselves. I think he does come to a place of great satisfaction about that.

What did you think of The Conners' last episode? Grade the series finale — as well as the entirety of the revival, including Roseanne Season 10 — then leave a comment with your full review.

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