"The drama of daily life is greatly heightened if one feels that society is organized against one"
With any luck, you don't know what this is about. You've never watched ABC-TV's Roseanne, and you've never seen its star, Roseanne Barr, although I don't know how you've managed to miss her. The sitcom is a hit, having dethroned the venerable Cosby; it is No.1 in the Nielsens, and fifty-five million of your fellow citizens tune in every Tuesday night. Her autobiography, Roseanne: My Life as a Woman, is a big bestseller; the publisher can barely keep up with reorders, and it may sell a million copies this year. The tabloids love her; you won't see an issue at your neighborhood movie house is She-Devil, a major motion picture in which Roseanne stars with Mery1 Streep, but does not, to her dismay, have a nude scene. Roseanne is five-feet-four-inches tall and weighs more than two hundred pounds, and the thing is, she wants you to see her naked; she is determined that one day you shall.
Now there's nothing revolutionary about Roseanne's TV show. She and her hubby are overweight, working stiffs, whose three kids are the serious-minded foils for their parents' post-adolescent buffoonery. "Roseanne Connor" is the video version of Roseanne Barr's nightclub persona. (This is the new obsession at ABC: Create a series based upon a successful stand-up comedian. Call it the Cosby Syndrome. There is Roseanne, of course, but also Richard Lewis of Anything but Love and Jackie Mason of Chicken Soup.)
Roseanne Connor is really Ralph Kramden in drag; she's Archie Bunker turned inside out. Her children probably go to school with the Bundy kids of Married with Children, and her proletarian neighborhood is as old and well-populated as any other video vicinity. Yet the seldom-perspicacious television press has hailed the series (now in its sophomore season) as, well, radical. If these geniuses were talking about the star's weltanschauung (not that she has one really; she has a "life-style" instead), they'd be right on the money, but, in fact, they're calling the series "unique," and in that they are dead wrong. Everything about Roseanne is used. Indeed, that's probably the key to the appeal of the show and its star.
Newsweek reviewing the first season's premiere episode gave a plot summary, and then asked, "Sounds real normal, doesn't it? And that's the gimmick." Time desperately tried to be more sober but had to muse that "the show's grungy ambience and gleeful puncturing of TV ideals of happy domesticity have made it the most daring new sitcom of the fall." If you ask me, that just goes to show how certainly the review media are under the spell of TV producers, and how degraded critical discourse has become. Roseanne can make you chuckle (usually thanks to John Goodman, who plays Roseanne's husband), but it more frequently makes you yawn.
Subverting Civilization
But two confessions: I'm a paranoid; I'm convinced prime-time television intends to subvert civilization. That's one. Two: I think TV criticism is toothless, whether sycophantic or captious. Bad reviews will nots ave our Republic from the reductionist mediocrities of Hollywood's well-fed radicals. Critical caviling can hurt books, paintings, plays and some movies, but not situation comedies, which why TV reviewers (don't call them critics) are such obsequious
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