Alex Duval Smith in Washington
NINE years after Roseanne began its ground- breaking, irreverent portrayal of working- class family life, television viewers in the United States will switch on with relief tomorrow for the last episode with the family America used to love to hate.
Roseanne’s ratings have plummeted in the last two seasons and even die-hard fans admit that the caustic, corpulent Mid-west couple, Roseanne and Dan, have lost their way.
It was not always thus. In 1988, television executives used to creating glitzy or happy-family series watched the former stand-up comic, Roseanne Barr, shoot her crass, loud-mouth character straight into the hearts of America.
Here was a warts-and-all title character who worked in a plastics factory and later in a diner and who told her children to “go play in traffic”. When Becky, the eldest of Roseanne’s four children, announced: “We’re having a food drive for poor people,” Roseanne said: “Tell them to drive some of that food over here.”
Until the last two series, when the Conners won $108- million in the Illinois state lottery, Dan was a hard-working but unlucky breadwinner who dabbled in building, running a motorcycle business and working for Lanford council.
In a storyline typical of the way in which the series had lost its way, last week’s episode had Dan’s mother, played by Debbie Reynolds, turning up and ludicrously plotting to kill her son because her medication was out of kilter.
Critics say the decline began when Roseanne, in real life, lost weight and had a face-lift. It continued when the Conners won the lottery.