Roseanne the Reboot

Purely out of curiosity, a curiosity perhaps colored by the wistfulness of a one-time affection, my wife and I watched the premiere of the re-booted television series, “Roseanne.” The show features most of the original 1988-1997 cast, including John Goodman, as the resurrected Dan, killed off by the end of the show’s nine-season run, but brought to life again (with a CPAP mask on, no less) through the magic of failed novelist’s (Rosanne) backstory.

My expectations were a bit low. By the time the original “Roseanne” series ended, I’d become saturated with the constant political messaging and overworked story lines. In all fairness, I’d felt the same about “All in the Family” (1971-1979, followed by four more seasons of “Archie Bunker’s Place”), when it began to run out of jab and steam and its characters began spinning off. There is just so much punch, punch, punch cynicism one can take; eventually one must leave the ring for a while.

Prior to watching the opening show, I read the New York Times and The Washington Post reviews of the reboot, and came away from the column with some hope that the show should be given a chance.

In his March 26 television column in the New York Times, James Poniewozik reviewed the revival of Roseanne.

“The Conners aren’t just preserved,” wrote Poniewozik. “They’re stuck. And they’re stuck in a way that underlines the show’s original mission of representing the kind of paycheck-to-paycheck life that other, more upscale sitcoms of the era left behind.” “Close your eyes, and you could be listening to vintage “Roseanne.” Poniewozik continued, “This is good and bad. The series’s voice is intact, but the zinger-based dialogue and rhythms can feel dated.”

 “But the beauty of the show’s language is how many feelings those zingers can communicate. The Conners use insults to express love and test old wounds. A conversation can shade from friendly chain-pulling to actual fighting and then back again.”

Hank Stuever’s, TV critic for The Washington Post, Sunday column was headlined, “Rebooted Roseanne is a proud ‘deplorable.’ Can she be the Trump era’s Archie Bunker?” 

In his column, Stuever wrote, ’Roseanne’ is back, in part, because everything else is back, because the 21st century turned out to be so thoroughly unappealing that our entertainment culture regresses into old shows instead of finding new ones to love nearly as much. After ‘Roseanne’s’ era, broadcast network comedies got faster and smarter but somehow shallower, mastering the art of snark while losing an ability to resonate with a broad audience.”

 Stuever continued, “And so, sporting a fresh layer of relevance, ABC’s groundbreaking sitcom ‘Roseanne’ makes an engaging return to life next week with its superb original cast (Roseanne Barr, John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert, Lecy Goranson and Michael Fishman) happily intact. They’re older and unhappier and, to a character, well acquainted with the demise of the American Dream.”

It is important for me to add this disclaimer: I use a CPAP machine, and several of the prescriptions Roseanne and Dan mention during the premiere reside in my medicine cabinet as well. The aches and pains of age, and the other health concerns about which the couple jokes are very real in my household. I see those concerns every day in the faces of the elderly, poor, and struggling families at our neighborhood grocery store and at the pharmacy counter when the price of their pills on the register screen stuns me. I am, thankfully, well-insured, but so many people are not, and that's a good part of the reason why this new version of “Roseanne” failed to make me laugh too often, though many of those references did make me groan in sympathy if not empathy.

In contrast, when I was thirty years younger (or forty-plus years younger during ‘All in the Family’s’ run), it was easier to laugh because I was not nearly as vulnerable, and because I was not looking in detail at the realities of poverty, aging, families-in-trouble, and healthcare. My laughter at those shows then came from my ignorance of what was going on all around me—even though I thought that with my good liberal arts education, upward-trending employment, intact family, solid bank account, and sound health, I was socially, racially, sexually, and politically astute.

Those “valuable attributes” were pure artifice when it came to seeing—not just looking at—the real world. Sad to say, those same things made it easier for me to laugh at other people’s troubles—television characters mimicking the world of the writers, producers, directors, and networks—while distracting me from the slowly rising tide of real-world issues that would eventually flood 21st century America with divisiveness, distrust, discord, and danger.

All of which is to say that the new “Roseanne” made me uncomfortable by turning the volume up on 30-year-old replays of political differences, gay rights, economic disparity, health concerns of the aging and poor, unemployment, and racial stereotyping. Yes, there was a positive nod to deployed-military service, and a good discussion of school bullying related to cross-dressing, but to me, these were thrown in as momentary station stops, not as long-term meaningful points of departure for the larger story line.

Peter Dunne Finley, a newspaperman of the late 19th and early 20th century, writing in 1902 under the pseudonym of the popular “Mr. Dooley,” said, “The purpose of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Dooley’s comment was meant sarcastically—a swipe at the journals of the time that dug into the personal lives of the rich and famous, while concurrently taking advantage of the travails of the poor to editorial advantage. 

I could be charitable and suggest that “Roseanne’s” network, ABC (owned by Disney), by rebooting the series, is trying to right the ship of Dooley’s sarcasm as it applies to television shows about the nation’s middle- and lower-classes. If the genuine intent of the show is to afflict the comfortable and send a message of support to those who feel left behind or who are struggling just to run in place, then I’m good with that.

I’m betting that many people who watched last night did get the points, and did respond with the right kind of laughter…laughter aimed at the bumblers and criminals who infest our government and corporations. If they will turn that laughter into action, so much the better. Toward that end, I suggest to Roseanne's producers and writers that they develop scripts that encourage personal and community action.

Did the show afflict my sensibilities, as reasonably comfortable as I am at this stage of my life? Not really. It brought up the same issues that surrounded me and my generation thirty years ago. But I’ve learned a lot since then, become more aware since then, become a vocal advocate for many of those causes since then. My goal as a social-media journalist really is to afflict the care-less-comfortable, the hateful-stupid, and the downright-dangerous forces that are eating away at the foundation of our society.

So one-liner digs at Trump and Clinton, the Rs and the Ds, the liberals and conservatives, big pharma, bullies, gay-bashers, self-righteous-but-clueless do-gooders, and overly-protective parents/grandparents just fluttered off the screen and came to rest on our television room floor. It’s not that I don’t care about those issues, quite the contrary: It’s that I care—have been caring—passionately about those issues, and “Roseanne” missed the boat I and many of my generation sailed on years ago.

Stuever closes his Post column with this observation, “’Roseanne’ needs to do more than acknowledge that a Trump-voting grandmother can get along with her liberal-leaning sister and adore her sparkle-riffic grandson. It should courageously allow the Conner family to more tumultuously grapple with the idea that America is coming apart and changing profoundly.” 

I couldn’t agree more.

The Time’s Poniewozik ends his review with, “’Roseanne’ is a revival that’s willing to grapple with the time that’s passed rather than deny it. It’s feisty and funny and a little sad. And like that old couch you can’t throw out, it may just have a good year or two left in it.” 

I agree with the “little sad” but it’s going to need a lot more "feisty and funny" to keep me from throwing the couch out.

My own opinion of “Roseanne” rests somewhere in between Stuever’s and Poniewozik’s conclusions. It is watchable, with moments of good acting (and moments when the actors seem to be looking at cue cards), with characters familiar enough to make you feel glad they’re back, and with themes that are important, if, in some cases, overly flogged on cable news long before they were written into the “Roseanne” script. 

The opening voiceover claims the show is filmed before a live audience, but, if so, it was a muted group, not so much unresponsive as underwhelmed as evidenced by its thin laughs and occasional collective intakes of breath. I get that. Seemed the same from my seat.

The Unseen Colors of the March For Our Lives

The opportunity to attend the March For Our Lives here in Washington, D.C., last Saturday was irresistible; fifty-one years ago, as an 18-year-old high-school senior and a wet-behind-the-ears news photographer for a local daily newspaper, I photographed tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam War marchers streaming across Arlington Memorial Bridge on their way to the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War on another Saturday, this one, October 21, 1967.

Anti-Vietnam War Protest Marchers, October 21, 1967, photo © Jim Moore

Before the main body of the marchers continued beyond the bridge, they paused, and a banner they were carrying, “Support Our GI’s [sic] Bring Them Home,” sagged across one of the rows of marchers. Being the 1960s, there were many protest songs being sung, including “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” written by Bob Dylan in 1964, and made popular by Peter, Paul, and Mary (who sang at the Lincoln Memorial at the beginning of the demonstration), Joan Baez, the Byrds, and many other artists prior to and years after the Pentagon march.

Half-a-century (plus a year) later, this time as a 68-year-old photographer without media credentials, and with the significant hitch of age in my physical mobility, I journeyed from my Alexandria home with a photographer friend to the rally on Pennsylvania Avenue on a bright, cool, spring morning. I brought my cameras and a healthy dose of optimism about the March’s mission—to bring the visual, vocal, and social-media power of young people to bear against the onslaught of gun-related deaths in America. My optimism proved right, though frankly, it was overwhelmed and ultimately boosted to a new height by what I experienced for the four hours I spent in the midst of the hundreds of thousands of people who packed Pennsylvania Avenue for nearly 14 long D.C. blocks. 

Participants at the March For Our Lives, March 24, 2018, photo © Jim Moore

This was no loose confederation of idealists, destructionists, chanters, off-message ranters, and unfocused protesters. Unlike the 1967 Pentagon march, which had a number of dark facets, bitter undertones, and political rancor detracting from a simple anti-war message, the 2018 March For Our Lives organizers and participants were absolutely on-point, on-message, and on-fire with vision, energy, and determination. While many adults attended (I saw thousands of my generation, and dozens of my parents’ generation there), what happened on Saturday was of, by, and for the nation’s young people—the generation to which will fall, in just a few years, the full weight of local, state, and national governance. 

The shooting deaths of 14 teenagers and three adults at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, brought to the national media stage some of the most articulate, politically-savvy, deeply philosophical, and empowered teenagers and pre-teenagers I have ever seen. And in the crowd that jammed Pennsylvania Avenue, it was clear to me that what the public sees in the faces of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas (MSD) students who are the impassioned spokespersons for the movement, I saw in their peers from every corner of the country. 

Six blocks from the Capitol, Pennsylvania Avenue was overflowing with marchers, photo © Jim Moore

Make no mistake; MSD student Emma Gonzales was riveting in her 6-minute-20-second speech. Likewise, her classmates David Hogg, Delaney Tarr, Cameron Kasky, Samantha Fuentes, Jaclyn Corin, and Alex Wind spoke with assured eloquence and ingrained determination (Fuentes was so emotional, she threw up during her speech, but soldiered on to complete it, with praise from the crowd). But there were also speakers from other schools and communities plagued by gun violence, and each, in his or her turn, spoke truth to the aged, unreasonable, unchecked, and deaf powers standing in the doorways and blocking the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and in the offices of the National Rifle Association.

Eleven-year-old Naomi Wadler, a student at George Mason Elementary School here in Alexandria, an organizer of a student walkout at her school, spoke with a confidence belying her age on behalf of “…African-American women who are the victims of gun violence.” Edna Chavez, a high school student from South Los Angeles, who lost her brother, Ricardo, to gun violence, noted in her speech, “I learned to duck from bullets before I learned to read.” And Alex King and D'Angelo McDade, from North Lawndale College Prep in Chicago, partnered on the stage with powerful voices ringing with words from Martin Luther King, Jr., and impassioned accounts of life under the constant threat of violence.

The crowd, having been brought to a high emotional pitch by so many of their peers, found itself as one mass of people lifted even higher by the simple words of one of the day’s last speakers, nine-year-old Yolanda Renee King, Dr. King’s granddaughter, “I have a dream that enough is enough, and that this should be a gun-free world.”

By the time Yolanda spoke, I’d returned home, tired and sore from the physical experience, but excited by what I’d felt and seen while taking pictures of people representing the broadest possible U.S. demography. I watched the replay of all the speeches—those I’d been there to hear, and those I’d missed—and my energy level increased. What I and several hundred thousand people experienced was part of what I’m going to have to describe as a part of the social-political spectrum heretofore unseen, but nonetheless quite real and important.

As any prism-and-sun experiment confirms, white light is really a combination of the full spectrum of colors visible to the human eye, from violet on the far left, to red on the far right.  

Visible light: the narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum humans can "see"

How the eye-brain combination works to discern individual colors must be left for additional reading outside this blog, but here’s what’s most important in the study of the spectrum: There are colors we cannot see, but which are nonetheless very much a part of the spectrum.We humans cannot “see” ultraviolet or infrared wavelengths—our eyes are just not designed that way—but they exist. 

Radio waves, microwaves, and X-rays, are part of that spectrum—heating our food, burning our skin, exposing our bones, delivering music to our ears—but it was only with equipment designed to make those wavelengths known and measured that we discovered the true span of what is called the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible color is but a small portion of that spectrum. 

So it is with America’s social-political spectrum. What we perceive as the social-political spectrum comprising the far-left to far-right political persuasions coupled uneasily to the myriad visible social strata in between: from black to white; from undocumented to dynastic blue blood; from dire poverty to untold wealth; from under-education to privileged education; from homelessness to penthouses; from debt-doomed illnesses to insurance-supported health; from huddled lives of daily fear to care-less lives of ignorance of those who live in daily fear.

These, and other visible segments of the social-political spectrum, are aspects of American life we can see, touch, experience, write about, dwell on, decry, exalt, wring our hands about, or ignore as we choose. The question is, do we have to accept this spectrum as the norm for our time (or worse, as the norm for future generations)? The answer, spoken forcefully from the March For Our Lives’ podium on Saturday, is “no.” No. We do not have to accept the norm, and, what’s more, there is a once-unseen and unheard portion of that spectrum that has the power to make that “No” a reality.

March participants watch Delaney Tarr, a student at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, photo © Jim Moore

America’s teenagers and pre-teens (as evidenced by Naomi Wadler and Yolanda King), are that long-overlooked, politically-ignored and unappreciated portion of the social-political spectrum that, in truth, is the source of the yet-untapped, but clearly sustainable energy the nation needs if we are to ever overcome the inequalities that color virtually every feature of our past, present, and (if left unaddressed) future histories.

Of course they have always been a part of the spectrum. There is no doubt that far too many teenagers were only appreciated by their government as necessary to the military, or as entry-level (if that) employees as a staple of the workforce. But, ask virtually any politician if he or she considers teenagers positive or negative factors in their continued electability, you will get either a condescending remark, or an “I-don’t-really-care” shrug. To many politicians already in office—local, state, or national—the potential of teens to make serious contributions to the pressing social issues of our time has, up until Saturday, been dismissed or, at best, patted on the back.

Let me be clear: I am not calling out all politicians, or all adults; there are a handful of politicos, and millions of parents, grandparents, teachers, and probably many employers, who stand firmly behind the young people they love, educate, and employ. And at Saturday’s March, I saw and photographed many aging folks like me who heard the strains of “The Times They Are a-Changin’" and recalled, wistfully, a time when we teens were fired up and ready to turn the world on its head.

Well, what we couldn’t do then, today’s teenagers are going to do tomorrow. I believe that. I believe that in the crowds here in Washington and participating or watching around the country, there are millions of young men and women who were inspired and energized by the March. They will need help focusing that inspiration and energy onto the problems facing the nation, but they saw role models on the podium at the foot of the Capitol, role models who are focused and energized, and who have a plan to bring their peers with them on a grand mission. 

The time is over for those in Congress who ignore the voices of tomorrow's voters, photo © Jim Moore

A new color of the American spectrum was revealed on Saturday, a color that was always there, but, until teenagers all across America stood their ground against violence, political ignorance, and ballot-box reluctance, it was a color politicians chose not to see. Beginning on Saturday, and gaining strength toward the Novembers of 2018, 2020, 2024 and beyond, there will be a new color painted on the walls of Congress and the Oval Office. My advice to today’s politicians and candidates who have not yet gotten the message: Help the painters or get out of the way.