8 Years Ago Today: An Iconic 80s Sitcom Was Axed Amid Uproar — and Its Replacement Actually Delivered

TV revivals are a gamble. Every so often one roars back like it never left… and then real life torpedoes it. That was ABC's 'Roseanne' in 2018. What followed was a sharp pivot that somehow made the whole thing stronger.

The 2018 comeback that worked — until it didn't

'Roseanne' returned in 2018 with season 10, 21 years after the original Lanford, Illinois sitcom signed off in 1997. It was one of those rare returns that instantly felt in step with itself again. The nine-episode revival did fine with critics and exploded with viewers: the two-part premiere pulled 27.6 million people. In network TV terms, that's bonkers.

ABC (not CBS, despite some confused chatter back then) quickly ordered season 11 for the 2018–2019 season. Then, on May 29, 2018, Disney shut it all down after Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet aimed at Valerie Jarrett, a former advisor to President Barack Obama. That ended the revival dead in its tracks — but not the Conner family.

ABC's fix: keep the family, lose the matriarch

To move forward without its namesake, the show had to address the elephant in the living room: where is Roseanne? The answer was blunt and grounded in something the original series never shied away from — tough, real-life problems. In the world of the show, Roseanne died from an opioid overdose, leaving Dan, the kids, and the rest of the clan to grieve and figure out what life looks like now.

That pivot became 'The Conners.' Most of the original cast and creative team stayed, so the tone and rhythm didn’t skip much of a beat. The new show started with a tragedy, but it used the franchise 's old trick: handle heavy stuff with warmth and humor, like a family actually would.

How the spinoff performed

'The Conners' launched as the most-watched new comedy of the 2018–2019 TV season. ABC even bumped the first season's count from 10 to 11 episodes. From there, it kept rolling. Across its run, ABC renewed it season after season, and by the time it wrapped in 2025, the show had crossed the 100-episode mark (officially cited at 112 episodes). It was still popular when it ended, and based on what folks involved have hinted, the finish line looked more like a cast decision than a network pink slip. In other words, it likely could have kept going.

Big-picture context: revivals are hit or miss

• Worked out fine: Netflix 's 'Fuller House' and Paramount+ 's 'Criminal Minds' revival both found an audience with shorter streaming runs.
• Couldn’t recapture the spark: Paramount+'s 'Frasier' revival and Peacock 's 'Punky Brewster' faded fast.
• Lightning in a bottle: 'Roseanne' season 10 was one of the few that snapped right back into place — until the off-screen implosion forced a reset.

Did 'The Conners' make the franchise better?

In a perfect world, the revival would have kept its anchor and avoided a rebrand. Barr's character was the gravitational center, and that short-lived season 10 showed the ensemble still clicked. But given the circumstances, 'The Conners' was the best possible outcome. Removing Roseanne gave the other characters more room to breathe and pushed the show into deeper, more vulnerable territory — which, frankly, is what 'Roseanne' did best back in the day.

Also worth noting: rewatching 'Roseanne' into 'The Conners' doesn’t feel jarring. The tonal throughline holds. And the final stretch of 'The Conners' even looped back to the matriarch's death in a way that actually felt full circle. It is, frankly, a cleaner exit than the original 1997 ending ever gave the family.

Bottom line

ABC lost 'Roseanne' but kept the Conners, and somehow the franchise got a second act that honored the original while standing on its own. Not how anyone planned it, but it worked.