Why ‘The Conners’ Faced Roseanne’s Legacy Head-On in the Series Finale
After seven seasons of navigating life without its controversial matriarch, The Conners closed out its run by doing what it had avoided for years: giving Roseanne Conner the final word.
In Wednesday’s series finale, the family revisited the tragedy that launched the spinoff—Roseanne’s death from an opioid overdose—and brought her back into the spotlight one last time. For executive producers Bruce Helford, Dave Caplan, and Bruce Rasmussen, the decision to directly acknowledge her was long overdue, and came with no shortage of nerves.
“I have to say, I was a little nervous,” Helford admitted, speaking to The Post about the backlash that’s surrounded Roseanne Barr’s firing since 2018. “There was so much anger about her not being on the show.”
Barr, once the voice and face of one of America’s most iconic sitcoms, was fired by ABC in 2018 after a racist tweet led the network to abruptly cancel the successful reboot of Roseanne. But within weeks, the cast and crew regrouped around The Conners, killing off her character and pushing forward without her.
Still, her shadow never really left.
Executive producer Dave Caplan said they always viewed Roseanne Conner as “the center of that family for so many years.” Ignoring her in the finale would have felt “really wrong, and really shortchanging the audience.” And so, in the final episode, the surviving Conners—Dan, Darlene, Becky, and Jackie—visited her grave, finally saying goodbye on-screen.
“She’s a central character in all these people’s lives,” Caplan said. “So it felt like the right thing to do.”
Rasmussen echoed that sentiment, saying the team wanted to honor the character, regardless of what people feel about the actress who played her. “She did birth that show,” he said. “She was beloved by the viewers.”
John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert, and Lecy Goranson returned for the finale, just as they’ve anchored The Conners since day one. But even now, six years after Barr’s firing, the production team admits there hasn’t been any communication with her. “We really have not spoken to her since then,” Rasmussen revealed. “She’s been pretty vocal about not being happy about the way things transpired. And I understand.”
Despite the fallout, the creators of The Conners say they never wanted to erase her character’s legacy. In fact, they used it as a driving force for the show’s closing storyline: a wrongful death lawsuit against Big Pharma that forced Dan to confront what her loss truly meant.
“When the character died, she died because people in their economic situation can’t afford the kind of medical care that they should be having,” Caplan said. “So we wanted the life of her character to amount to something… and we carried that.”
With the cast gathering around her grave in the final moments, the series offered an unexpectedly heartfelt farewell to the woman who once defined it. It was risky. It was complicated. But in the end, it was the only way to close the door.