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Showing Original Post only (View all)The Roseanne revival is incredibly honest about life in Trump's America [View all]
Source: Vox, by Todd VanDerWerff
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What makes Roseanne Conners Trump support such an interesting idea to build an episode of television around is the way it blissfully wanders into one of 2018 pop cultures demilitarized zones: Entertainment can be for Trump supporters or for those who dont like Trump, but its not supposed to be for both.
And for both white progressives and white conservatives who share a family (yes, there are people of color struggling with these political divides in their own families, but this is overwhelmingly an issue for white families), this is a constant fact of life in 2018 America: Can we still love each other? Can we work this out? Should we work this out? The answers are as varied as these families are, but Roseanne takes the simple idea of living in 2018 without killing your family members or even just dying yourself and builds a whole season of a TV show around it.
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Roseanne has always been about the big gap between the American dream and the American reality for too many people. When I cite the original series vague progressivism, I dont really mean that it had a coherent political framework so much as it believed in the idea that the American dream was too often hoarded by those who least needed access to it, who then parceled it out in little chunks to those further down the ladders of economic, racial, and social privilege. It called, week after week, not for revolution but for understanding that people like the Conners were out there and just trying their best.
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That makes Roseanne sound like some sort of dark elegy for a forgotten America, I realize, and maybe it is that. But its also funny and vibrant and warm. It takes a little while to rediscover its rhythms, but once it does, it feels tuned in to its world and its country in a way few sitcoms are anymore. There are punchlines in these episodes that dont land because the audience seems scared to laugh at how raw they are. Good, I think. This show has always been better when the humor comes peppered with fear.
Read it all at: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/27/17165928/roseanne-review-revival-abc-trump
Twenty years later - none of us are the same.