By Dave Riley
In the name of situation comedy, an unending array of nuclear families has come our way. In almost 40 years of television, we have been dropping in on the Ricardos, the Nelsons, the Bradys, the Bunkers, the Huxtables, the Bundys and so on — enough households for the peopling of a whole suburb. Our screens light up: welcome to America.
We sit at home and watch them in their living rooms doing things we don't do in ours. That's entertainment.
This domestic commonwealth now exists as a tradition — one constantly renewed and redefined as a celebration of the mundane. It is a television perennial more favoured than quiz shows and just as conservative.
Roseanne (Ch 10) shares much with its peers and predecessors. Nothing out of the ordinary here: a television family with 2.5 children. Action moves mostly from kitchen to living room. Just Mum, Dad and the kids.
However, it is that very mediocrity which makes this program special. The most simple and common situations are observed with wry wit. Each episode is a parable of domestic life warmly but not loudly told. The absence of brash and quirky characters perhaps sets Roseanne apart from other comedies. Still, its humour is wrought with high skill especially by the two leading stars.
Roseanne is the namesake of Roseanne Barr, the celebrated comedian of domestic life. Her repute is large in the United States. Here we have had little opportunity to see her work aside from the US version of Loves of a She Devil. Barr has impeccable delivery without ornament. Hers is a cosy bluntness that sets the tone for the whole series (for which she is executive producer).
Barr's remarkable skills are teamed with those of John Goodman (who plays her husband Dan Connor). Goodman is a comic actor of great stature already well established in cinema (Raising Arizona, Arachnaphobia, Barton Fink). Why he would turn to television I don't know, but aren't we lucky for it. His character is an ordinary Joe sometimes bemused by the high jinks around him. With two teenage daughters and a wife who knows his place, he is the series' perfunctory adult male. Throw in a very junior boy and there you have it, yet another television family.
This seems all a very standard set-up but the very lack of pretence in Roseanne shadows its feminist strength. The Connors are a family who must deal each week with a new sexual without resorting to smug sophistication and an easy put-down.
Their lot is to grapple with surviving in a very different world to that of their TV forebears, in which changing roles just won't go away. For once, it seems, television is catching up with our living rooms, and the Connors' comic parade surely does bear witness to the ongoing political shenanigans at your place or mine.