Domestic Goddess Dethroned
Roseanne 's final
episode will air Wednesday night, but the Hollywood press machine, which
operates on the principle that no one who earns $21 million a year can be all
bad, is cheerfully toasting its star's bright future. The theme: We haven't
heard the last from her. Roseanne, it is said, will become a serious movie
actress, a best-selling author, a standard-bearer of feminist populism. Her
current role--the Wicked Witch in a theatrical production of The Wizard of
Oz --will make her a Broadway star.
Well, here's an alternative
prediction: We have heard the last from Roseanne. And if we haven't,
we'll soon wish that we had.
TV
critics, at least the political-minded ones, opine gravely that
Roseanne 's cancellation proves that a complacent America has lost its
appetite for "real-life," "blue-collar" characters, that all TV viewers want
now are 3 rd Rock
From the Sun aliens and
Seinfeld yuppies. This is wrong. Roseanne 's cancellation proves
that America has lost its appetite for a "real-life," "blue-collar" character
played by a spoiled Hollywood brat. By making it, Roseanne destroyed the very
thing that defined her: not making it.
Once upon a time, Roseanne mattered. She understood what it
meant to be lumpenproletariat , and made it her life's project to explain
this outsiderness to America. She did it brilliantly. Between its 1988 launch
and 1993, Roseanne ranked among the three highest-rated shows on
television. It transcended demographics. The working-class folks whose lives
Roseanne claimed to depict tuned in. So did wealthier viewers, to whom the show
represented blue-collar chic. Roseanne was not only television's most
popular sitcom; it was also its best (except, perhaps, for The
Simpsons ). As Roseanne Conner, Roseanne turned the pain of poverty into
comedy, exposed the absurdities of family life, and punctured the egos of
bosses and politicians. Like All in the Family --and no show
since-- Roseanne gave life and warmth to the ugly, the fat, the poor. It
was social criticism of the best sort, a tonic to the Family Ties/The Cosby
Show pablum of the Reagan-Bush years. Roseanne Conner became a genuine
populist icon, an anti-June Cleaver for a downsized era.
Roseanne
Barr became an icon, too. In 1989, she made more magazine covers than anyone in
history. Several years later, The
New Yorker invited her to guest
edit its women's issue. But her celebrity depended on a fiction: that the TV
character was in fact the actress. For a while, she was. Like her TV namesake,
Roseanne was trailer trash. She was a former waitress and prostitute who had
lived in squalid poverty with a ne'er-do-well husband and three kids. She had
street credibility. Roseanne assured her fans that Hollywood could not change
her. She and her second husband, Tom Arnold, himself a former meatpacker, built
themselves a mansion in Iowa to escape the L.A. phonies. Arnold proudly
described the pair as: "America's worst nightmare--white trash with money." You
could take the girl out of the trailer, but you couldn't take the trailer out
of the girl.
But of course everything changed, though
Roseanne herself did not seem to recognize it. She went Hollywood in the worst
possible way. The Domestic Goddess became just another prima donna. She and
Arnold divorced by tabloid. She tyrannized her co-workers, throwing fits,
firing writers at will, terrorizing her underlings ( Roseanne is
notorious as the worst workplace in television). She publicly accused her
parents of abusing her and her sister (they denied it). She followed Madonna's
lead by dropping her last name. She married her security guard (perhaps
Hollywood's hoariest cliché). She underwent repeated plastic surgeries in order
to reduce her breasts, smooth her wrinkles, slim her face (alarmingly, she
looks younger in the ninth season of Roseanne than she did in the
first). She stopped telling interviewers about anal sex and started talking
about her deep spiritualism and her study of mystical Judaism. In short, she
became a parody of celebrity, indulging in every whim of the Hollywood
overclass.
Fame did
more than make Roseanne grotesque; it also untethered her from the Domestic
Goddess, the one idea that made the show great, "the only good idea she's ever
had," as one acquaintance puts it. She could no longer portray a convincing
Roseanne Conner, largely because she no longer had any connection to Roseanne
Conner's world. In its last few seasons, the show lost its grounding in
reality. Plastic surgery made Roseanne Conner look less like a haggard mom than
like, well, a TV star who's had a lot of plastic surgery. Roseanne used
to tackle issues like homosexuality or race relations with grace (e.g.,
Roseanne's lesbian kiss with Mariel Hemingway). But recently the show has
succumbed to ludicrous ratings-pandering gimmicks (e.g., Roseanne's mom's
emergence from the closet).
During this final season, Roseanne attempted the most
desperate plot device of them all: She had her TV family win $108 million in
the lottery, replicating her own rags-to-riches story. What few shreds of
real-life credibility remained after that plot twist were destroyed by cameos
from C-grade celebrities (Tammy Faye Messner? Marlo Thomas? Moon Unit Zappa?!)
and lame parodies of Xena: Warrior Princess , Rambo ("Roseambo,"
the episode was titled), and I Dream of Jeannie . TV husband John
Goodman, who'd grown sick of the show and Roseanne, was all but written out of
the plot. The audience melted away. Once a top-10 regular, Roseanne fell
to 14 th place in 1995 and 32 nd in 1996. It may finish as
low as 40 th this season.
What may be saddest about
Roseanne 's decline is that the show won't leave the legacy Roseanne
intended for it. It didn't usher in a golden age of real-life sitcoms.
It didn't open the airwaves to blue-collar characters. Its single
accomplishment--if it can be called such--is that it legitimized the stand-up
comedian as sitcom star: from Roseanne to Seinfeld to
Ellen .
Not that Roseanne needs your
sympathy. She's earned $40 million in the last two years, making her the
second-highest-paid woman in show business, after Oprah. Syndication revenues
will guarantee her millions for years. She is about to launch her own TV talk
show. Don't be surprised when it flops. She's spent the last nine years talking
on television. She seems to have nothing left to say.
