‘The Conners’: Major Character Might Not Be in Much of Season 3

Season 2 of The Conners dropped a ball on their viewers after one main character may be facing prison time come the next season — although a Season 3 has not been formally announced. In the final moments of the season-ending episode, viewers saw Becky (Lecy Goranson) become an accomplice when her husband, Emilio (Rene Rosado), reentered the U.S. illegally after being deported. According to TV Line, Executive Producer, Bruce Helford, described Season 3 as “rough.” While the storyline continues to change, so do the schedules of several members of the cast due to other projects and the postponement of other productions they’re working on, making a Conners timely return a bit of a challenge.

“Some of the complications just go away. Righteous Gemstones was never in first position for John. So he actually becomes available to us sooner than he would’ve become available to us,” Helford said. “The tricky one is Emma (Kenny, who plays Harris) because she’s on Shameless and they now may start shooting [their final season] around the same time we [begin production on Season 3]. She’s become like the co-lead on that show after Emmy Rossum left, so it’s going to be tricky. We always find ways to work around schedules. We like the actors being able to explore other things. We’ll make it work.”

Although ABC still has yet to formally announce a renewal, Helford assured fans that the four main characters played by John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert and Goranson have already signed deals, but since the coronavirus pandemic, questions have been left unanswered on when, and maybe even how they’ll start filming again, along with everyone’s schedule changes. However, although there’s no way to know when everyone will get up and running again, Helford did say that they hope to be back shooting in August.

After the huge adjustment the cast and fans had to make after former lead Roseanne Barr was killed off due to controversial tweets Barr posted, her on-screen husband Dan Connor (Goodman) has found a new love interest, Louise, played by Katey Sagal. Now fans want to know if this will be a permanent thing or not, but according to Helford, they don’t plan to “kill anybody else off.” While that may prove true, both Goodman and his onscreen character were reluctant at first on having him move forward with someone else so soon.

“At the beginning [of the series] we talked to him about how slow we were gonna go and he was absolutely thinking about Roseanne [and Dan’s] relationship. But as we went along, Katey was so great; we could see John starting to have fun with her and bounce off her. I think he’s a lot more comfortable now,” Bruce Rasmussen, co-executive producer said. Fellow EP, Dave Caplan added, “John has lived with that character for so long. He’s so deep into Dan that he has an internal metronome about how fast things should go and we wanted to respect that. So we talked to him and made sure that he understood how fast we thought we could go and wanted to make sure he was on board with that.” Helford concluded, “It took him a while… We did go slow for John.”