ABCThe Conners Season 7 is just around the corner, but Roseanne Barr hasn’t been part of the sitcom since its very first episode, with the character being killed off in the Roseanne sequel series.
Roseanne proved to be one of the most successful sitcoms of its time, kicking off in 1988 and running for nine long seasons until 1997. Barr was once the face of the franchise, starring in it up until the Season 10 revival in 2018.
However, the revival was cut short, and instead repurposed into The Conners. As a direct continuation of Roseanne, the binge-worthy TV show follows the lives of the Conner family as they navigate everyday struggles without their matriarch.
After seven years on air, the series is coming to an end, with its seventh and final season premiering on ABC on March 26, 2025. Just don’t expect the former face of the franchise to be making an appearance. Warning: some may find this content distressing.
Why Roseanne Bar isn’t in The Conners
ABCRoseanne Barr’s absence from The Conners is due to a highly publicized controversy in 2018. Just months after the Roseanne revival became a ratings hit for ABC, she was fired for posting a series of racist tweets.
One of the tweets, shared on May 28, 2018, referred to former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett as the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes”. She later deleted the post and, the following day, apologized to Jarrett on X/Twitter.
“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste,” she wrote.
However, ABC swiftly canceled Roseanne before rebranding the spinoff as The Conners – without Barr’s involvement. The show premiered in October 2018, killing off the main character.
X/TwitterAt the time, Barr called the decision “grim and morbid,” later tweeting, “I AIN’T DEAD, B*TCHES!” in response to her character’s fate.
Earlier this year, she expressed disdain for ABC while speaking about her plans for a comeback comedy series about a family who save “America with guns, the Bible, petty crime and alcoholism.”
When asked by Variety if she’d consider ABC if it showed interest, she simply said, “F**k no.” Similarly, she said she doesn’t “give a f**k either way” if any other Hollywood studios want to get involved.
“I’d like to get paid handsomely to bring another sh*t f**king network back from doom as I’ve done twice for ABC,” Barr stated. “But I just don’t see how they would keep their nose out of my business. We’ll see. If not, I’ll just go somewhere else and put it on my own website.”
How Roseanne died in The Conners
ABCIn The Conners, Roseanne Conner’s death is revealed in the first episode, ‘Keep on Truckin’, which aired on October 16, 2018. Initially, the family believes she died of a heart attack in her sleep, but it’s later revealed that her actual cause of death was an opioid overdose.
The storyline ties into events from Roseanne Season 10, where Roseanne struggled with a knee injury and became dependent on painkillers. However, her addiction wasn’t fully explored before the show was canceled.
In The Conners, it’s revealed that she had been secretly abusing pain medication, leading to her fatal overdose. The family finds out after a coroner’s report shows she had a mix of different opioids in her system, some of which weren’t prescribed to her.
Barr, along with her longtime collaborator Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, released a statement condemning this creative decision.
“While we wish the very best for the cast and production crew of The Conners, all of whom are deeply dedicated to their craft and were Roseanne’s cherished colleagues, we regret that ABC chose to cancel Roseanne by killing off the Roseanne Conner character,” it states.
“That it was done through an opioid overdose lent an unnecessary grim and morbid dimension to an otherwise happy family show.”
While The Conners has managed to carve out its own success, Barr has never been invited back – and with the final season on the horizon, it’s safe to say she never will be.
What about Dan Conner’s death?
ABCThe writers of the revival essentially made the decision to retcon Dan Conner’s death, and later fully committed to Roseanne’s passing.
You see, in Roseanne Season 8, Dan suffers a heart attack at Darlene’s wedding. In the final Season 9 episode, it’s revealed that he actually died, and much of the season had been a figment of Roseanne’s imagination.
The last moments of the original TV series reveal that the Conner family never won the lottery (a major plot point in Season 9), and that Roseanne had been rewriting reality in her memoir to cope with Dan’s death.
However, when Roseanne returned for Season 10 in 2018, this entire plotline was ignored. The revival simply acted as though Dan had never died and none of the events of Season 9 happened.
This continued in The Conners, sparking questions from fans. As one wrote on Reddit: “So Dan dies of a heart attack in Season 9, and the entire season is a figment of Roseanne’s imagination.
“But in The Conners Dan is ALIVE and Roseanne is dead with absolutely no mention of what happened outside of the fact that we know Roseanne’s producers decided not to work with Barr anymore.
“My question is, is there something I missed here? Did they canonically correct this or just completely not care and just reverse the writing?”
Another fan of the show was on hand to explain, “It’s called retcon. It’s a device TV shows use to change what has happened to create a new plot.
“The first episode of the reboot before Roseanne was fired said that Dan never died and it was just in Roseanne’s book… But the biggest retcon was getting rid of Roseanne and Dan’s fourth child Jerry and Jackie’s son Andy.
“Jerry was mentioned in the first episode of the new show as working on a fishing boat in Alaska, but then he was dropped and The Conners have said there are just three kids. Jackie’s marriage and son never happened at all in the reboot and The Conners.
“There are other shows that use retcon to change things when one story isn’t working, but it was specifically mentioned that Dan never died and it was just Roseanne’s book.
“Dan didn’t cheat on Roseanne either like he did in the old show. So viewers just have to accept what they tell us and not question their motives.”
The Conners Season 7 premieres on ABC on March 26 at 8pm ET, with new episodes streaming the following day on Hulu. For more fresh content, check out the new TV shows streaming this month, the best new series to watch on Netflix, and the best shows of 2025 so far.