Roseanne Is Back. So Is Family TV
Time|April 2,2018

ROSEANNE CONNER IS A TRUMP VOTER, and it makes sense.

Daniel D'Addario
Roseanne Is Back. So Is Family TV

The sitcom mom played by Roseanne Barr lives in one of the Rust Belt towns that broke heavily against Hillary Clinton—though, in Illinois, she’s technically a blue stater. She’s provocative and likes to speak frankly. And, in the first episode of her sitcom revival (premiering March 27 on ABC), she’s newly attracted to one side of our ongoing culture war. Preparing to say grace before dinner, she makes a reference to recent NFL protests, asking her liberal sister (Laurie Metcalf), “Would you like to take a knee?” Roseanne has always been an insult comic, so it’s no surprise that she’s drawn to a President whose power comes in part from his punch lines.

In its first run, Roseanne was political, but more implicitly than explicitly. The show dealt less with debates happening on the national stage and more with ones happening at kitchen tables, with the frayed purse strings of two working-class parents, and the even more frayed sanity that came with their trying to raise three kids in the midst of the 1990s’ evolving cultural mores. Returning after 20 years off the air, though, Roseanne enters a world in which kitchen-table debate has become dominated by the cultural chaos that created and is stoked by the President. It’s among a group of sitcoms doing crisp and effective work taking on social issues—territory that mainstream TV drama has all but left behind.

This story is from the April 2,2018 edition of Time.

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This story is from the April 2,2018 edition of Time.

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