As long as there’s been TV, the family has been one of its favorite go-tos. All week long, Vulture is exploring how it’s been represented on our screens. The following is an excerpt from Joy Press’s forthcoming book, Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, out March 6.
A family sits around a cluttered kitchen table, arguing and roughhousing. Finally, the man at the table leans over to smooch his wife. She cheerfully wipes off the kiss, letting loose a peal of bawdy laughter.
That was how America met the Conner family on October 18, 1988. In its minute-long opening sequence, Roseanne conveys a concrete sense of this rambunctious working-class household. There are bills on the table that are probably overdue, and kids interrupting as their parents shrug them off. There are dowdy clothes and bad hair and faded wallpaper. But most of all, there is that glorious laugh of Roseanne’s hanging in the air, a perfect chord of raucousness and affection. It signals a family life bound by love but not muddied by sentimentality.
