Roseanne

I never watched an episode of Roseanne until two years ago. It started coming on Nick at Nite. Now this is a pretty funny show. I like it. Its funny and sarcastic. But I have a real problem with the way the show went downhill in the last seasons. Most significantly, the way they killed any hope for their kids.

They talk often about how a parent is successful if they can give their kid 50% more than they had. But Dan and Roseanne both graduated from High School and neither Becky nor Darlene did. Darlene did get some sort of equivalency because she was in college. Until they made her drop out because she got pregnant.

Becky got inspired by Darlene and decided to go back to college. She thought that she might have to leave her husband, Mark the not-so-smart mechanic, to do it. Roseanne told her that she should not give up on her marriage. Not a bad piece of advice necessarily, except that she made Becky think that she had to choose between Marriage and College and that it should be Marriage. Why not both? My parents both got college degrees after they were married.

In the end, it just annoys me. They made a show that was supposed to be what "real life" people were like. Instead of Leave it to Beaver. Yet they wanted to make it not a cartoon like Married with Children. But in the end, it was just a cartoon. The idea seemed to be that they could prove that regular working class poor people are good people. What they proved to me that these particular working class poor people will be doomed to repeat the same mistakes and never actually make any progress.

I don't know. The character Roseanne is a really great one, but the show seemed to sell her out. Because they need ratings, they just kept pushing this family back down by making them do stupid things. It's sad to me. I'd have liked to seen Becky and Darlene make something of themselves. They didn't have to get rich. But they could have escaped upward to middle class. Instead we have Becky thinking that a 30,000 dollar a year job is the living the high life.

Its not that its all about money. But Roseanne and Dan sucked up doing what they had to do so that Becky and Darlene could do something that they wanted to do. But in the end. They just crapped out. And that sucks.

-T