I was never a Roseanne watcher. Whenever I did see a little bit of the show she was always berating some man for being a man and spouting some kind of blue collar feminism. So I’d switch the channel. Here we are twenty plus years later and Roseanne is rebooting the show to chronicle the later lives of the fictional blue-collar Conners family. And I hear Roseanne is a Trump voter and supporter. And they say her show has attracted eighteen million viewers.
Well, all the entertainment pundits are saying the networks will roll out a bunch of blue collar right-wing Trump loving family shows. Yeah, right. Let’s be real. About a year ago the only slightly positively portrayed right-wing character on television was Tim Allen’s Mike Baxter on Last Man Standing. It was a reasonably popular show. And because Trump was elected the show was cancelled. Do I believe somehow they’ve discovered the error of their ways? No. Whatever Hollywood imagines right-wing blue-collar values are will basically be Hollyweird wearing a ballcap or a cowboy hat. I don’t believe Roseanne Barr is any closer to my beliefs now than she was twenty years ago. The only difference is she has been left behind by the precipitous lurch toward insanity that the left’s leading edge has performed in the last ten years. So Hollywood will churn out shows based on benchmarking “Modern Family” as the new Ozzie and Harriet and “playfully” experiment with the exciting idea that Trump voters are unconsciously ready to embrace trans-bathrooms and indoctrinating small children into sexual perversions.
I look at this breathless discovery of Roseanne’s popularity as the usual two steps forward, one slightly slower step forward that is the default reaction of progressives to right-wing resistance. So if there is any good news in the Roseanne story I guess it’s that they at least still try to make believe they care what we think or what we want to see on TV. Hurray for Hollywood?