Two decades after its season “finale” in 1997, Roseanne made its triumphant return to prime-time television this past Tuesday night. More than 18 million people tuned in (including President Trump) and, if the hot takes are to believed, most people loved it (including President Trump). Critics have attributed the largely positive reception of Roseanne to its sympathetic portrayal of white, working-class family concerns: employment and financial insecurity, health care costs, struggles with prescription drug dependence, their real or perceived neglect by mainstream news media, the real or perceived hostility toward them manifest in pop culture trends, and many other of the intra-familial values-battles that beset 21st century “blended” families.
Americans are more divided along party lines today than we have been in our nation’s history. As a consequence of this, I think we can see two, irreducible but mutually reinforcing, trends emergent in this contemporary nation-at-war-with-itself. On the one hand, those who would self-describe as “good conservatives” are desperate to see sympathetic portrayals of themselves in popular media, something with more verity and nuance than the liberal caricature of a violent, naively religious, virulently racist, and uneducated “flyover” demographic. On the other hand, self-described “good liberals” (read: minimally left-of-center Democrats) are desperate to cling to literally anything– political, cultural, or moral– that might confirm their commitment to “bridging the divide,” that might show that they still occupy the High Road, that they are the most eminently capable of “seeing both sides,” and oh, not for nothing, that might expand their tent and get them votes (however insincerely those votes might be acquired or cast). Combine these two misguided desperations, and what do you get? The Frankenstein cultural product we saw Tuesday night in the premiere of Roseanne.
I finally got around to watching the premiere last night. I am not a fan.
Like the original Roseanne, the re-booted Roseanne has its merits. It does, in fact, manage to sympathetically portray many of the struggles of working-class, white families that really ought to both get more attention and inspire more sympathy. In particular, I thought its treatment of what I sometimes call the “Aging Trifecta” (inability to retire, inadequate healthcare, and prescription drug dependence) was handled with exactly the right balance of realism and gallows humor. Roseanne also deserves credit for its hilarious send-up of a certain ilk of Democratic Party liberal— in the Certified Life Coach character “Aunt Jackie” (played by Laurie Metcalf)– who both conservatives and actual progressives rightly find exasperating IRL for their reductive sloganeering, knee-jerk outrage, and lazy relativism.
Those merits notwithstanding, there are a lot of problems with Roseanne, and even more reasons to be concerned with the enthusiastic uptake of it as a model for both conservatives’ concern (i.e., “sympathetic portrayals”) and liberals’ concern (i.e., “bridging the divide”).
As I’ve said many times before on this blog in reference to what I call “lazy relativism,” we should be deeply suspicious of, and even more deeply critical of, the overly-reductive imperative to “see both sides.” Of course, I do believe that it is absolutely necessary, in times of disagreement, to extend your interlocutors the most generous interpretation of their position. This is a sine qua non for not only productive philosophical thinking, but for productive conversations about all matters of shared import. However, it is also my firm conviction that in conversations about matters of shared import, if they are of real import, “seeing both sides” almost never means “validating both sides.”
I mean, if everyone agrees to the same proposition, you have to wonder how much commitment, or even thought, it requires to affirm that proposition. The same is true if everyone “likes” the same thing. To wit, if 18.2 million people liked what they saw when they watched Roseanne earlier this week, it’s worth asking how and why?
Here’s my hypothesis: The new Roseanne is a lazy relativist reboot of All in the Family.
Above is the theme song (“Those Were The Days”) to the 70’s television sitcom All in the Family, a series that served as the preeminent example of what New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum called “Fandom’s Great Divide,” a divide not between those who love a show and those who hate it, but between those who love it in very different ways. It is worth recalling that between 1971-1979, when All in the Family ran on network television, Americans also found themselves deply cleft and alienated from one another over many issues that we see cleaving us today: racial injustice, economic inequality, sexism, war, the many and varied disputes over social, political, and moral values that attend every generational shift.
All in the Family was also, like Roseanne, a television series primarily focused on the concerns and struggles of working-class, white families. Its protagonist, “Archie” (Carol O’Connor), was an unapologetically racist, sexist, xenophobic, but occasionally amusing and endearing, bigot; his wife, “Edith” (Jean Stapleton), was a longsuffering, patient, accommodating, and selfless housewife and mother. Much like the Connor family in Roseanne, the Bunkers’ world-view was constantly being pushed up against by family members and/or neighbors who represented some iteration of 70’s “liberal” caricatures: hippies, blacks, homosexuals or sexual libertines, feminists, single parents, communists, dope-smokers, immigrants, et al.
BUT HERE’S THE IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE: the following “disclaimer” ran over the opening credits to All in the Family:
“The program you are about to see is ‘All in the Family.’ It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show—in a mature fashion—just how absurd they are.”
That, dear readers, is a difference that makes a difference.
Let me just get right to it. The problem with the new Roseanne is that it has acquiesced to the desperate needs of both so-called “good conservatives” and so-called “good liberals” that I indicated above and, by doing so, fallen directly into the self-centered, self-affirming, but contentless black hole that is the trap of lazy relativism. It has, in effect, implied that “I can see both sides” also means “I affirm both sides.”
It does not and it cannot. When Donald Trump calls to congratulate Roseanne Barr on her “fantastic ratings,” and later implies in a speech that those ratings implicitly demonstrate that common ground has been found between their ideological positions… well, either someone is wrong or someone is wrong.
Let’s take, for example, the cross-dressing (and maybe gender-fluid) grandson “Mark,” played by Ames McNamara, in the first episode of Roseanne. We’re given a handful of seemingly-harmless bigoted jokes about him from the POV of his conservative grandparents, including jokes about violence that might be done to him or violence he might have to do in defense of himself, but those jokes are only made “seemingly” harmless because, in the end, his bigoted grandparents quite literally accept with open arms (and warm hugs) Mark’s life-choices. Now, that kind of response may happen in some families, but those families are statistically rare. They are absolutely NOT representative of the behaviors of families or communities that lean “conservative.”
Ditto for the treatments of all the other token liberals represented in the pilot episode of Roseanne. And it’s worth noting how similar those “tokens” are to their 70’s All in the Family counterparts: blacks, homosexuals or sexual libertines (or gender non-conformists), feminists, and single parents.
The absence of an All in the Family-type disclaimer makes it possible for Roseanne to “bridge the divide” without actually bridging it, because Roseanne is only concerned with one divide– between “those who like the show” and “those who hate it.” Roseanne twists itself into an ideological pretzel to accommodate the former and, in so doing, it completely elides the more important difference, which is (as Nussbaum explained) the difference between why the people who like the show like it. Roseanne “sees both sides” by playing both sides, which means taking no side. It gives conservatives the satisfaction of a sympathetic portrayal, and conservatives like the show, because conservatives don’t see those portrayals as absurd. It gives liberals the satisfaction of showing their magnanimity and expanding their tent, and liberals like the show, because liberals don’t know that conservatives don’t know that it is a parody, “shining a spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns” in order to show “just how absurd they are.”
What we have been given in the “new” Roseanne is like the image above. Only the two protagonists– conservative, working-class, whites– are given color and nuance. Everyone else is a black-and-white caricature in the service of sympathetically portraying Dan and Roseanne Connor.
Of course conservative, working-class, white people in this country are complicated and nuanced people. They have struggles and concerns that attend to their specific demographic, some of which are under-recognized and underserved. Some of them, I am sure, are more than willing to hug it out with their children, siblings, neighbors with whose “lifestyles” or commitments or causes they disagree. But working-class, while, American conservatives also have, as a demographic, certain ideological commitments.
The Dan and Roseanne Connor that I saw in the Roseanne premiere, the ones who “deep down” have the exact same concern for gender-nonconforming youth, for women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies, for productive political conversation, for safe schools, for black and brown people, is a blatantly false portrayal of the ideological commitments of the majority of the IRL demographic that those fictional characters are meant to represent.
So, if Roseanne is meant to “throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns… to show just how absurd they are,” as All in the Family explicitly intended to do, then I’m on beard.
But I’m gonna need a disclaimer. Because I’m absolutely positive that there remains a world of difference between myself and Donald J. Trump.