'The Conners' Cracks Joke About Where Roseanne Ended up in the Afterlife
The Conners continues to mark major milestones this season, and another one came up during Wednesday's episode that gave the family a chance to joke about where Roseanne Conner might be in the afterlife. In Season 4, Louise (Katey Sagal) has finally married Dan (John Goodman) and in "Yard Sale, Phone Fail, And a College Betrayal," the Conner family began making room for Louise in their Delaware Street home by selling furniture for a garage sale. This brought up memories of Dan's life with Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) and the days when they first moved into the home.
As Dan began taking out some of the pieces of the bedroom set he bought with Roseanne decades ago, he joked about how his life has changed. "Before this, it was lawn chairs in the living room and a phone company spool for a table. That's when we were just starting out and I wasn't the mogul I am now," he he said during a conversation with Becky (Lecy Goranson). "But your mom saw a picture of this set in the Montgomery Ward catalogue, and boy did she fall in love with it."
Before throwing out the bedroom set, DJ (Michael Fishman) offered to play Rock Paper Scissors with Becky to decide who gets to keep the "mattress we were conceived on and Mom died on." Becky thought that was a bad idea. "Ew," Becky said. "I don't want a humpy, ghosty mattress!"
The scene took place right after the opening credits, with DJ, Becky, Dan, and Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) preparing for a garage sale. Dan said he needed to clean out the master bedroom because Louise wanted a whole new bedroom set instead of using 43-year-old furniture. He also wasn't too thrilled about her not wanting to use her own bedroom furniture, which would save Dan plenty of money. But he understood where she was coming from. After all, she did pay for their wedding and he has to pay for something. He didn't have the money, so selling the old furniture was the best he could do.
Unsurprisingly, no one really wants four-decade-old furniture, so Dan decided to just burn it all. "I always thought the Vikings did it best," he said. "Set it on fire, sent it to the heavens!" "And if it goes the other way, Mom gets her furniture back," Becky joked.
The Conners launched a spin-off to Roseanne in 2018, after the Roseanne revival was canceled because of Barr's racist tweets. At the beginning of the new series, Roseanne Conner died from a drug overdose. Since then, the show has been respectful towards the character, even including a scene earlier this season where Darlene (Sara Gilbert) found a note in her mother's Bible, notes TVLine. Becky's joke about her mother being in hell still seemed to fall in line with the show's brand of self-deprecating humor.
"We think the Conners are determined to move forward, but they're only human," The Conners executive producer Dave Caplan told PopCulture.com this week. "And it's natural to want to sneak a glance in the rearview mirror once in a while and look at your past, but they do their best. And they feel like they strike a pretty good balance of making a new future, but being respectful of where they came from. And the Roseanne character is part of that." The Conners airs Wednesdays on ABC at 9 p.m. ET.