Beloved sitcom Roseanne is on its way back to the small screen for a revival in 2018, and it promises to bring back a lot of what made the show such a hit in the first place. In fact, Roseanne is bringing back some original elements that technically shouldn't be possible for a revival set in the same universe as the original. Fans will recall the heartbreaking twist in the final season that revealed Dan had died of a heart attack and Roseanne had been writing stories to cope with his death. Well, John Goodman will be back and Dan will be very much alive in the revival, and a new commercial has debuted that pokes fun at the resurrection. Take a look!
This commercial manages to take lighthearted shots at both the return of John Goodman as the dearly not-so-departed Dan and the show itself for resetting to pretend that Dan had never died, which is quite a feat for a promo that only runs for 15 seconds. It's pretty perfect that the footage starts with Dan and original recipe Becky (who will have an interesting plot with Becky 2.0 in the revival) watching basketball. When Roseanne asks how the game is going, Dan replies that the Bulls of '96-'97 would have definitely beat whoever was playing. Roseanne's awesome reply of "You can't live in the past, Dan! When things are gone, they're gone forever!" is worth rewatching the clip a few extra times.
As longtime fans may remember, the final season of the original run of the series ran from 1996-1997, which means that Dan's line about the Bulls had less to do with basketball than about Roseanne itself. The commercial manages to combine the total blast from the past of Dan, Becky, and Roseanne talking sports with nods to the fact that their world has moved on. Roseanne won't be stuck back in 1996-1997 mode anymore, which is probably for the best on all counts.
It should be interesting to see how the Roseanne revival compares to other recent revivals. Fuller House on Netflix glories in nods and jokes at Full House, and the fourth wall may as well not exist at times for that particular show. Given how Roseanne is bringing back so very many of its characters, there's a chance it could go in a Fuller House-esque direction. Will and Grace also brought back its four lead characters and mostly picked up as though the show had never left the airwaves, and audiences have responded quite well. Who knows? Maybe it will have some similarities to The X-Files, which threw the old familiar faces into some very new situations. We'll have to wait and see.
You can catch the very first episode of the Roseanne revival on Tuesday, March 27 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC. Our midseason TV premiere guide can let you know other important dates in the new year, and our Netflix TV premiere guide can help you choose what to stream. Of course, if you want to stream the original Roseanne ahead of the March 27 revival premiere, you'll have to head to Amazon rather than Netflix. For the shows that got the axe over the past year, take a peek at our 2017 TV cancellation rundown.
