‘The Conners’: How Dan Reacts to Roseanne’s Death

All eyes were on Dan Conner during the series premiere of Roseanne-less spinoff series The Conners Tuesday night.

The episode, which revealed the cause of death of the iconic matriarch, showed Dan (John Goodman) coming to terms with not only her death, but her secret problems with addiction.

Though the family first thought Roseanne Conner (Roseanne Barr) had lost her life after a heart attack, Dan finds a pill bottle with someone else’s name hidden at the house that leads to the tragic realization of what happened.

Rather than giving himself away to grief, Dan resorts to publicly shaming the woman whose name appears in the pill bottle by taping a sign that reads “Thank You Marcy Bellinger for the pills that killed my loving wife Roseanne” to his car.

His actions lead to a heartbreaking confrontation between Dan and neighbor Marcy (Mary Steenburgen) outside the house, where Dan’s grief truly comes out.

“I can’t eat. I’m drinking myself to sleep, I have to live with this for the rest of my life, isn’t that enough for ya?” Marcy tells Dan.

“My wife is gone. What do you think?” Dan tells her.

The conversation also led to the reveal that Roseanne was a part of a group of neighbors who helped each other out by supplying prescription drugs to each other when they were too expensive.

“Roseanne called me. She told me her knee wasn’t healing fast enough and that I was the only person she could turn to. She said she needed those pain pills to get back to work cause you guys were running out of money.”

“I would never have given them to her if I knew she had a problem,” Marcy tells Dan, adding that she knows what it’s like to have problems with addiction.

Dan was also surrounded by friends and family throughout the premiere, including Chuck (James Pickens Jr.) and his children.

Goodman was the first cast member to allude at the fact Roseanne Conner would be written off the spinoff series with her death.

“It’s an unknown. I guess he’ll be mopey and sad because his wife’s dead,” Goodman told The Sunday Times earlier this year when asked how The Conners would find Dan.

In the same interview Goodman revealed how feeling “broken-hearted” after the cancellation of the Roseanne reboot, which came after Barr was fired for posting a racist tweet in May.

“[B]ut I thought, ‘OK, it’s just show business, I’m going to let it go,’” Goodman said. “But I went through a period, about a month, where I was very depressed. I’m a depressive anyway, so any excuse that I can get to lower myself, I will. But that had a great deal to do with it, more than I wanted to admit.”

The Conners airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.