‘The Conners’ Star John Goodman Reveals How Bad the Days After the ‘Roseanne’ Cancellation Were for Him

John Goodman felt like a plastic bag was “closing in on” him following ABC’s decision to cancel Roseanne.

“I was consciously trying to accept it,” Goodman, who recently spoke to PEOPLE, recalled after hearing news of the cancellation. “Just like, ‘Okay, this is happening, just breathe and go with it.’ Underneath I’m trying to get out of a plastic bag that is closing in on me, but I’m trying to be calm on the surface. I remember that contradiction.”

The decision to pull the plug on the ABC series was made after the series’ namesake Roseanne Barr issued a racist tweet regarding a former White House adviser, something that was deemed inconsistent with the alphabet network’s values. But the cancellation had a ripple effect among the cast and led to “a bad time” for Dan Conner’s John Goodman, who said he went through a month-long period of struggles.

“[I struggled] for about a month,” he said. “And then other things started going wrong. I fell down the steps and broke a rib. My wife got sick — just all kinds of weird stuff happened at one time. But I just had a feeling that it would work out.”

On June 21, ABC announced that it had greenlit a Roseanne spin-off series, The Conners, which would be moving forward without any creative or financial ties Barr.

“There was a debt owed to this fictional family,” Goodman said. “We want to finish telling this story.”

The Conners, which was granted a 10-episode debut season by the network, will also see the family at the heart of the series cutting ties with Barr’s onscreen counterpart following a “sudden turn of events.” While it is not known how exactly Barr will be written out of the series, Goodman suggested in August that her character would die.

“It’s an unknown. I guess he’ll be mopey and sad because his wife’s dead,” Goodman said.

Barr herself even suggested that her character would die due to an opioid overdose following her knee surgery.

Despite Barr’s absence, Goodman promised that “everything else is pretty much the same.”

“Any sadness that we feel over what we’ve lost we’re hopefully channeling in an honest way into the show,” Sarah Gilbert, returning to the new spin-off series in her role of Darlene, said. “And our show has always been able to deal with heavy topics, particularly for a sitcom. It’s been kind of built into the mix.”

The Conners will premiere in Roseanne‘s previous timeslot on Tuesday, Oct. 16 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.