‘The Conners’ EPs on Honoring the ‘Roseanne’ Legacy in Series Finale

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the series finale of “The Conners,” streaming on Hulu as of April 24.

After 37 years, the adventures of Dan, Jackie, Darlene, Becky and the rest of the family have come to an end with the series finale of “The Conners” on ABC Wednesday night. And although those kinds of goodbyes can be tricky, especially with a show that has so much history — both on-camera and off — executive producer Dave Caplan tells Variety, “We felt a tremendous responsibility to get this right.”

In a way, Caplan and fellow executive producers Bruce Helford and Bruce Rasmussen were aware of the pitfalls that an end of a series can present, keeping it storyline-driven and character-driven. And balancing keeping the conclusion sentimental when it should be, but funny as well. They felt like the “stewards” of the show and the characters, they say.

“It has a certain legacy of being a little bit closer to the bone, a little bit more honest [about life], and we weren’t going to betray that at the end,” Caplan says. “So we didn’t want to do a, you know, ‘Turn out the lights and lock the door’ kind of ending to it. We know the family goes on, but we wanted to leave them all in a place that felt like they could conceivably be there. And that the arrows for all of them were pointing up, and saying goodbye to one member of the family.”

The entire six-episode final season of “The Conners” had the family looking back at the death of the Roseanne character from an opioid overdose in 2018, and suing the pharmaceutical company. Doing so brings a lot of issues to the surface for them all, especially for Dan (John Goodman) and his new wife, Louise, played by Katey Sagal. In the finale, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) returns to the police force, Darlene (Sara Gilbert) works out marriage problems with her husband, Ben (Jay R. Ferguson) and feels the loss of sending off her son, Mark (Ames McNamara), to a job in New York City, and Becky (Lecy Goranson) gets a high-paying job that utilizes her psychology degree and firms up her relationship with her beau, Tyler (Sean Astin).

In the series finale, the poignant goodbyes to Roseanne at her graveside were short, sweet and funny, but realistic for the characters, starting with Dan learning that the lawsuit didn’t go quite as he had hoped — they’re awarded the paltry sum of $700. No happy little bow tying it up, like the mistake “Roseanne” made in Season 9 when the family became millionaires with a state lottery win (which then turns out to be a fantasy of Roseanne’s). The outcome on “The Conners” gives them a good laugh, and has Jackie’s husband Neville (Nat Faxon) joking it was so “in brand” for them. But the real emotion comes back at the Conner home later that night, when their exits from the stage one by one had the actors breaking character — and breaking into tears.

“Laurie went first,” Helford says. “When Laurie said her goodbye, it was clearly not the goodbye of somebody who just had pizza and was gonna see you tomorrow. So when she went there, they all realized in that moment that this is the last time we’re going to say goodbye to each other on this stage, in this show, as these characters. And they all broke up. We left it in, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before on TV, where you break the fourth wall to see what the actors are really feeling.”

Keeping a straight, unemotional face was just too hard for them, he says. “They went there, and we thought it should be part of the show.”

And Dan’s reaction — which had Goodman looking straight into the camera —  that wasn’t planned either. “It jolted us when he did it,” Rasmussen says. “It’s like, oh man, that was good. It was one of those moments. We did other takes after that, and we had a conversation about, ‘Can we put the one that we all responded to on television?’ John made the choice, and we loved it.”

“Roseanne” was revived in spring 2018, and proved to be massively popular. But ABC immediately canceled the show after its first season concluded when star Roseanne Barr posted a series of racist tweets. Soon afterward, “The Conners” was conceived, and the Roseanne character was killed off in the show’s series premiere the following fall. “There were still stories to tell, so this was always about maintaining the quality and legacy of the original ‘Roseanne’ series, and also we tried to honor Roseanne in the last episode,” Helford says. “She was a beloved matriarch and birthed this show. We wanted to make sure that there was attention paid to that.” And they did just that.

Although “it was never a consideration” to have Barr back for a visit for the finale, Caplan says it was of great importance that “the family would have a certain kind of regret that she’s not around now to see all the wonderful things that are happening. So we knew that was gonna be emotional.”

Helford adds: “It was by her grace that we were allowed to continue. She had to agree that she would not be participating — because we were faced with having almost 300 people to be out of work at that moment in time. What transpired at that point, it was by her grace to say, ‘Go ahead and continue.’ She obviously had legal rights in the ownership of the show, and she let it continue, so she definitely deserves that place of honor that we try to respect.”

Dating back to the original incarnation of the show as “Roseanne,” which aired 1988-1997, the comedy always represented struggling working-class America, and touched on controversial topics. There was always a heart to this family in which viewers felt that struggle — but then you laughed with them because they laughed at their own life.  

“We always wanted to honor the nobility of the working class in this country, because they certainly get short-shrift in a lot of areas,” Caplan says. “The fact that they laugh at their circumstances is where we get our humor from. We’re never going to laugh at them. We’re always going to laugh with them.”

The story of the Conner family has ended — but they “live on in syndication,” as Caplan puts it. “There’s nothing more jarring than coming to the last episode of a show in syndication, and it feels like the lives of these people that you’ve invested in have stopped suddenly. That’s the worst. And we didn’t, we didn’t want that.”

There is one spinoff idea that the show’s last episodes seemed to be setting up: Jackie rejoined the police force and her adversary at the force is another cop — one played by Metcalf’s real-life daughter, Zoe Perry.

“Everybody, everybody loved them,” Helford says. “They had such good time together; it was so much fun. The moment that they would finish a scene, her daughter would look at her and go, ‘Oh my God.’ The mannerisms are so in sync. It’s wild to watch two of them. It was really fun.”

So, what do you say, guys? Yes? No? Maybe? “First of all, on this show, you never say never ’cause we bring people back from the dead,” Helford says with a laugh. “But in this case, we really feel that for right now, we want to honor the legacy. We want to feel the scope of what has been accomplished, and make it an appropriate moment for the show. So I think at this moment in time, there’s no intention or discussion either.”

Caplan adds with a wink: “I’m working on a Claymation spinoff in my basement. I don’t know if it’s gonna go anywhere, but we’ll see.”