The original ABC run of Roseanne made it one of the most popular sitcoms in its day, and it's since become one of the most popular sitcoms ever. Its follow-up The Conners has followed in those footsteps. Many of the original shows' cast and regular characters have made appearances in the follow-up series, but when The Conners comes to a close tonight, it will do so without bringing back a few notable names, including George Clooney.
It’s something of a piece of historical TV trivia that one of George Clooney’s earliest roles was as Roseanne’s supervisor, Booker Brooks, on the first season of Roseanne. While he would go on to bigger and better things, in everything from Batman movies to Oscar wins, the producers of The Conners revealed they did try on more than one occasion to get Clooney to return, but he turned them down because it would have opened the TV guest star floodgates. Executive Producer Bruce Helford told TVLine:
We did reach out to him numerous times, and he said, ‘You know that I would, but if I do it for you guys, I gotta do it for everybody I’ve ever worked with who has a TV show because it would be wrong for me not to,’ so that was his out on that.
Clooney, like most actors, did a lot of TV appearances before joining the main cast of his own show with ER, which then led to his successful film career. While The Conners is the only one of those shows to get a direct revival, one imagines that many of the people who worked on those shows are still in the industry, and if Clooney did the favor for that show, the rest would come calling.
It's not a completely unreasonable feeling. There have been talks of a Murder, She Wrote reboot, and Clooney appeared in a couple of episodes of the original series. If Clooney appeared on The Conners there would be a precedent that might result in more of these offers, and if Clooney says yes to some and no to thers, he'd have different people upset with him.
While George Clooney hasn’t exactly retired from Hollywood, he’s certainly not appearing on screen with the frequency he once did. He’s in a position where he can choose to work or not. He’s likely already turning down plenty of work and isn’t looking to say no more often than he already is.
Assuming Cloney was on the level with this comment and wasn’t just trying to let the producers down easy, it sounds like he might have been willing to make an appearance on The Conners if it had truly just been a one-off. It’s too bad, as it would have been a pretty cool TV moment, and certainly a full circle one for Clooney, if they’d been able to pull it off.
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