Leading up to the première of the new season of “Roseanne,” back on TV
after twenty-one years, so much had been made of the fact that the
series’ matriarch, Roseanne Conner (Roseanne Barr), was a gleeful Trump
supporter, it appeared likely the show would become subject to the
same rigid cultural sorting that has befallen all other entertainment in
the Trump era. Before the season’s first two episodes aired back to
back, on Tuesday night, the comedian Billy Eichner tweeted,
“If Roseanne is a hit they should do an I Love Lucy reboot where it
turns out Lucy loves Stalin.” Meanwhile, Dan Scavino, an assistant to
the President, celebrated that #Roseanne was the top trending subject
of the evening, tweeting,
“So awesome!!!” Watching the show or not watching it, or liking it or
not, seemed a matter, suddenly, like everything else, of taking sides.

Indeed, the first episode—after a funny opening scene in which the show
declares that Roseanne’s husband, Dan, played by John Goodman, is still
alive (erasing the folly of offing him in the series’ misbegotten ninth
season)—turns quickly to a fight about contemporary politics. Roseanne
and her sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), we learn, haven’t spoken for a
year, torn apart by Roseanne’s decision to vote for Trump, though he
goes unnamed. In a grand entrance, Jackie arrives back at the
house—invited by Roseanne’s adult daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert),
who’s moved back in along with her two kids—wearing a pussy hat and a
pink T-shirt with the words “NASTY WOMAN” written on the front.
Throughout the first episode, Roseanne and Jackie taunt each other:
Roseanne calls her sister a “snowflake”; Jackie calls her a “deplorable”
and brings a bottle of Russian salad dressing to dinner.

Finally, in a face-to-face showdown in front of the kitchen sink, the
long-standing venue for Conner blowouts, the two try to make peace, and
it becomes clear that their year-long mutual silent treatment was less
about politics than it was a continuation of their troubled sisterly
dynamic. Roseanne had, essentially, gaslighted Jackie, bullying her
sister into questioning everything that she believed about herself and
her family—and about Roseanne’s formerly blue-collar progressive politics—to
the point that she couldn’t tell what was what. By Election Day, 2016,
Jackie reveals, in the episode’s funniest line, she was so befuddled
that she didn’t vote for Hillary but voted for Jill Stein instead. It’s
a familiar “Roseanne” scene, one that played out hundreds of times
during the show’s first run, from 1988 to 1997—outrage, recrimination,
and then, finally, a tired détente. Metcalf’s perfectly overwrought
delivery gets a huge laugh from the audience, but the bigger laugh comes
after Barr, who, just managing to keep a straight face, says, “Well, the
important thing is that you voted.”

If the new season of “Roseanne” has a particular politics, it’s there in
that final line—and it’s one that neither pro- nor anti-Trump partisans
can credibly claim as their own. It’s a classic Roseanne Conner line,
bitterly sardonic, mocking of authority and of good mild-mannered civic
behavior, dubious of the idea that much of anything can change or that
people like her and her family could do much to change it. It’s a joke
that could have been made about any of the previous Presidential
elections during which the show was on the air—Clinton or Bush, who
cares?—but, in the Trump era, it feels out of step with the heightened
stakes and tension of the moment. It’s a shrug, really—a big, broad,
uproarious shrug—delivered at a time when we assume that no one out
there has the gall to muster ambivalence.

The new season, which moves away from Trump after the first episode, is
partly about nostalgia: the opening credits, ending with Roseanne’s
cackle; the hooting and aww-ing studio audience; the unchanged
furniture, even shabbier in H.D. But, mostly, it is about stasis. Two
decades after we last saw them, Roseanne and Dan are still sitting at
their kitchen table, trying to make the frayed ends meet. (Now, unable
to afford their prescriptions, they became makeshift pharmacists,
sharing one another’s pills in an approximation of proper dosage.)
Darlene was supposed to be the family’s upwardly-mobile success story;
she made it to college and out of the town of Lanford, Illinois, for
Chicago, but after getting laid off from her job, she’s back in her
parents’ house. “I thought I could buy a huge house that I could hold
over your head,” Darlene tells her mother, summing up her midlife
disappointment. Darlene’s sister, Becky (Alicia Goranson), forty-three,
is trying to con a rich woman (played, in one of the show’s funny winks
to fans, by Sarah Chalke, who took on the role of Becky in Goranson’s
absence, during the show’s earlier run) into believing that she’s a
decade younger, so she can be a surrogate mother and pay off her
credit-card bill. The Conners’ son, D. J., is back, from an Army
deployment in Syria, with his young daughter, Mary, while his wife
remains overseas. (Their fourth child, Jerry, a late-season sitcom baby,
is said to be off on a fishing boat.)

Despite many changes in the characters’ lives in the intervening years,
their central preoccupations and frustrations remain unchanged. For the
Conners, the Trump era looks a lot like the Obama era, which looked a
lot like the Bush era. In a recent interview with the Times,
Barr was asked about her own public support of Trump, and how changes in the country would alter the show’s humor. “Same
jokes, same kind of thing,” she said. “Just trying to get through
paycheck to paycheck and handle it. Having no jobs and people losing
their homes and you know that never, ever being talked about on
television.”

“Roseanne” is rightly celebrated for the way it addressed a
variety of social issues over the years, often staking out progressive
positions ahead of their time, but its central theme was always a
critique of the American Dream itself—its blistering contempt for the
idea, espoused by both political parties, that simply playing by the
rules of democratic capitalism could lead to lives of satisfaction and
betterment. (That’s why the show’s ninth season, in which the Conner
family appeared to win the lottery, was so jarring.) Roseanne’s
explanation for why she voted for Trump—“he talked about jobs”; “he said
he’d shake things up”—is flimsy, and not really the point. When she
thanks Trump, while saying grace, for “making America great again,”
she’s not being serious but, rather, trolling her sister, and speaking
with the same kind of gallows humor that she always has, twisting
political pablum for her own devious purposes. Her life isn’t great,
which she’d be the first to tell you: she thought of herself and her
family as deplorables long before the word arrived at its current
meaning. But her family is funny. Life in modern America is often
pitiless and cruel, and, within the confines of the Conner house (which
is, of course, just a sitcom set), comedy is a coping mechanism, a way
to embrace one’s own powerlessness by way of ironic misdirection—a
constant flow of breathless joking, teasing, shouting, flirting, and
laughing to keep the disappointments of the real world at bay.