i read sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs recently; while i wasn't a huge fan, i am a fan of masturbatory discussion of minute television factoids, so readers prepare. as i cleaned my apartment the other day, i had a roseanne marathon on the tv. it was the last season, as any fan of roseanne knows (come on people, it's a good show!), the season where the show compleeetely jumped the shark. it reminded me of chuck klosterman's discussion of Puck on the Real World, who tried to change the nature of reality television through his open acknowledgment of its falseness. i think in a similar way, Roseanne tried to push the bounds of the sitcom television world, and failed as well. it is extremely difficult to break the accepted dimensions of tv show formats, and roseanne's failure showed that it is not just the corporate heads who restrict tv, but audiences as well.
let me explain. in its final season, the conner family wins the lottery. now the lottery is a very common storyline is sitcoms; I can think of episodes in Full House, Family Matters, and Step By Step where this issue arises. But inevitably, by the end of every episode, they discover that there has been some sort of a mixup, and life returns to normal. this is what is so fundamentally comfortable about sitcom life- it does not change. it is the same reason why sitcom children rarely move out of the house as they graduate high school, attend college and so on. it is also part of the idea of the everyfamily- we want to feel like the family on the screen could be our family, and we certainly don't want them to be lucky and get breaks that we aren't getting. i think the exception to this would be shows that are set up in a wish-come-true format like The Beverly Hillbillies and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air- the very nature of these shows is to portray wish fulfillment, people like us somehow finding themselves in crazy different situations (mostly coming in to a lot of money). But once a show has settled on being a family just like you, they cannot break out of this format.
in the last season of roseanne, we go on to see the problems that the conner family would face having come into so much money. roseanne tries to mingle with a higher class of people, the neighbors become jealous, and ultimately it tears their family apart. but more importantly, it is not who the conners ARE. when we entered our relationship with the show, it was with the fundamental understanding that they are equal or lower than our family. they essentially tried to create a new show in the last season, and that was why it failed.
it failed so badly that in the last episode, it was revealed that the entire plotline was actually a dream, and that dan conner had in reality died. now that is some backpedaling if i've ever seen it. i think it was a great move, because it allowed them to erase that terrible mistake, and return the family to the down-to-earth gristle-and-bone family that we had spent so many years with. but it also shows that tv audiences don't want to be pushed, they can't even accept a show moving to another similar format. and its interesting, that's all i'm saying.