After Darlene and David start dating, an episode deals with him being overly clingy and constantly hanging around the Conner house. All amiable and typical, right? Well, not too many episodes later, viewers meet David's abusive mother and get a good idea of what his home life is like. Re-watching the earlier episode with that in mind, David has more of a reason to cling to Darlene than what everyone else thought. It also explains why he latched so hard to Darlene of all people. There's the old saying about how people seek out people who act like their parents. His relationship with his mother is physically abusive at worst, but emotionally abusive even at the best of times. He clung to tightly to Darlene because she acts a lot like his mother does and that's merely what he's used to. Their relationship is a Freudian field day.
The Conners struggle financially, but live in a three-bedroom house with private bathrooms for each, with a garage, laundry room, and a finished basement. Most of the improvements were probably Dan's handiwork.
Jackie's Flanderization from a clever, confident and slightly neurotic woman to a complete basket case. Her father's abuse of her and Roseanne was bad enough, but then her boyfriend Fisher started to hit her. The one-two punch of an abusive father and boyfriend plus all the other bad luck she had in romance and careers left her a broken woman.
David becoming more of a snobbish Jerkass in the later seasons. A crappy home life, being an Extreme Doormat to his controlling and sarcastic girlfriend, bullied by not only his older brother but said girlfriend's younger brother and then being dumped? Eventually a person's gonna get fed up and start pushing back, and this was the only way someone like David could.
Early in the series it was established Lanford was in Fulton County, Illinois, in the West Central part of the state. Other episodes place in closer to Chicago though. Considering the series is a book written by Roseanne this goof can be handwaved. She took creative liberties while writing the story.
Roseanne and Dan's respective arguments with God after Dan's heart attack take on a different meaning after the finale. Dan actually died of his heart attack. His begging for God to let him live is the begging Roseanne herself must have done while he was in the emergency room, and Roseanne's accepting responsibility for cooking all the unhealthy meals that clogged his arteries must have come later in her grieving. Both conversations were from her point of view at different times in her grief.
In that same vein, Roseanne and Dan's huge argument after he's released from the hospital and he won't change the unhealthy habits that caused the heart attack in the first place must also represent her anger and anguish at herself and him.
Dan and Roseanne reconciling just before Darlene is admitted to the hospital. When Roseanne explains what really happened—that Dan died and it wasn't until Darlene had the baby that she forced herself to snap out of her grief—you realize that this reconciliation was actually her finally coming to terms with his death.
Michael's Des Barres as the doctor who treats baby Harris. He also played Leon's (very well-dressed) partner in season 4, so why not imagine him as a brilliant doctor?
In the season 3 episode "PMS, I Love You", Roseanne's PMS is played for dark laughs but because the episode is told from Dan's POV, Roseanne comes across as being strangely written, almost like a series of sitcom stereotypes; one minute she's a violently angry shrew, the next minute she's sex-mad, the next minute she's an over-emotional ditz who doesn't want to go to lunch because "we're destroying the ozone layer". The terrible thing about PMS is that it really turn people into one-dimensional caricatures of themselves; the contrast between the various different Roseannes in this episode, and the three-dimensional, realistic Roseanne we usually see, is what makes the episode great.
If there's such a thing as Fridge Heartwarming...David was introduced to the audience as Kevin, Mark's little brother. Later, Roseanne lampshades this by saying that David is just what Darlene calls him. David is Hebrew for "Beloved." (Kevin is Gaelic for the same thing.)
The first season, especially the early episodes, tend to have at least one moment where everyone congratulates Roseanne on whatever bold, heroic Jerkass behavior, and in particular, the Wellman Walkout scene is exactly the kind of thing everyone who's ever worked a crappy job has played out in their heads at least once. The series is a book Roseanne is writing as her attempt to make right all the things in her life she feels are wrong. Those proud moments are most likely situations she really experienced, but with more favorable endings that everyone respects her for no matter how she behaves. In other words, Roseanne is a literal, in-universe Canon Sue written by an amateur writer. As the show continues, she faces more realistic consequences because now her author isn't so protective of her.
One wonders what was going through Roseanne the author's mind when she wrote the part where her dad's in the hospital and Jackie fills in for her - and everybody has a personality transplant.
She may have wanted to improve Dan and Jackie's relationship but had no idea how the family acts when she's not around.
Why Darlene is more willing to open up to Karen than to Roseanne: Karen doesn't criticize her and that's all Roseanne does. Even when she's being encouraging, Roseanne is boorish, loud, invasive, and prides herself on being smarter than everyone else, and that usually turns her rare moments of praise for Darlene into scoldings for not reacting the way Roseanne wants. Darlene responds much better to a more honest, gentler approach, but that's just not how things are done in her family, and Roseanne still blames Darlene for it instead of considering that talking to your children almost exclusively in snark would naturally yield a snarky kid; no wonder she's a better daughter with Karen. Karen's the better mom.
There's also the simple fact that Karen is not her mom. She has no obligation to parent Darlene: nag at her or force her to do things she doesn't want to do or any of the other negative baggage that comes with parenting. Even in good mother-daughter relationships, daughters might be reluctant to share some parts of their lives with their mothers and sometimes for innocuous reasons. For Darlene, that innocuous reason may simply be that the bookstore is her alone time away from the rest of the Connor family, because even happy families need occasional breaks from each other.
Darlene's stated reason for being OK with Mark (her son) wearing girls' clothes is that forcing him not to can only do more harm than good. But surely the fact that to do otherwise would mean spending money she doesn't have on boy clothes he won't like when he's happy wearing Harris' hand-me-downs enters into it as well.
Harris doesn't make a habit of wearing such bright colors; Mark's wardrobe probably was purchased especially for him.
Maybe she did when she was younger?
The point where Roseanneactually ended was the season 2 finale Happy Birthday, where Roseanne starts working on her writing in the basement Dan arranged for her, and this episode plays a huge in the original finale, which revealed that Dan had died from his heart attack, Becky actually dated David and Darlene dated Mark and Jackie being a lesbian. So, the episodes that came after the second season were could have her fantasy.
However, thanks to the revival retconning the season 9 finale, the final scene can now be seen as Roseanne just simply finishing her book, and she included the huge reveals that aired in 1997, and everyone (including Dan) is safe and well.
Because of fallout from the 2016 presidential election, Roseanne and Jackie didn't speak to each other for about sixteen months.
In "A Stash from the Past", David unhesitatingly assumes the blame for the pot, not because Darlene told him to (In fact, later in the episode when she does order him to, he disobeys) but because he's afraid it's hers and his immediate instinct is to protect her, even to the point of being humiliated and punished for things that weren't his fault. It feels like just another silly moment in a very funny episode, but looked at in terms of his terrible home life before the Conners, it's pretty sad and makes you think about how often he may have had to cover up for his mother, or take the blame for things he didn't do because there was no point in arguing, or to protect his little sisters.
In "A Stash from the Past", Dan, Roseanne, and Jackie indulge in some of their old pot. In the next episode, Jackie announces she's pregnant from her one night stand with Fred two episodes earlier. What effect will that have on Andy?
One time, before she knows she's pregnant? Probably not too much.
In the Season 9 finale, we learn that the plot about winning the lottery was just an extended fantasy, and the whole series was Roseanne writing a book. What if the "lottery" was an insurance payout from Dan's death?
Darlene's anniversary will forever be linked with her father's death. Or not.
Darlene's premature baby was real, though the lottery win was not, meaning that Darlene, Roseanne, and the entire family went through the nightmare of wondering if Baby Harris would live or die without being able to bring in the best neonatal doctors in the country, and with the additional stress of knowing they were taking on enormous medical bills they would not be able to afford (particularly since the family's breadwinner just died).
In light of all this, it's not hard to see why a desperate woman might imagine a scenario where the family's just won the lottery, money is no object, and her beloved husband is still there to help her as a kind of Wish-Fulfillment fantasy in the midst of arguably the worst period of her life.
Jackie's willingness to forgive Fisher after he abuses her makes a lot more sense the more we learn about her and Roseanne's abusive father Al. Roseanne refuses to forgive Al, but Jackie is more apt to blame Bev for being the "real" problem because she allowed it to happen and didn't intervene. The cycle of abuse thus continues, with Jackie making excuses for Fisher just like Bev did for Al—suggesting that Jackie is actually blaming herself for getting abused. It's a terrifying look at how abusive relationships can warp sane minds into accepting terrible things without question.
In The Conners, instead of totally ignoring Andy's existence in Roseanne, the sequel spin-off appears to acknowledge that Jackie was pregnant with him, but she ultimately decided to terminate the pregnancy.
No, the timing would be totally wrong. The Conners implies Jackie had a different pregnancy at a much younger age which she chose not to keep.
