The gang’s (almost) all here! The official Twitter account for ABC’s The Conners shared a photo from the pilot table read on Friday, August 31, showing the entire Roseanne cast – with the exception of Roseanne Barr – gathered around the kitchen table.
Sara Gilbert (Darlene), Jayden Rey (Mary), Michael Fishman (D.J.), Ames Mcnamara (Mark), John Goodman (Dan), Laurie Metcalf (Jackie), Lecy Goranson (Becky) and Emma Kenney (Harris) sit together, looking very family-like, in the first pic.
The Conners is a spinoff of the Roseanne revival which debuted in March 2018. While it received massive ratings, the show was axed in May after Barr tweeted a racist comment about former White House aide Valerie Barrett. After canceling the show, ABC decided to pick up The Conners, with the original cast and crew. Barr agreed to give up all her rights to the show and will not appear or have any financial involvement in the series.
The network has not yet revealed how Roseanne Conner will be written out of the show, but many – including Goodman – assume she’ll be dead when the spinoff premieres.
“I guess he’ll be mopey and sad because his wife’s dead,” Goodman, 66, told The Times in an interview published on August 27. He also admitted it’s been a rough time for the entire cast.
“I was broken-hearted, but I thought, ‘OK, it’s just show business, I’m going to let it go,’” he said about the cancelation. “But I went through a period, about a month, where I was very depressed. I’m a depressive anyway, so any excuse that I can get to lower myself, I will. But that had a great deal to do with it, more than I wanted to admit.”
When it comes to his former costar, he told The Times he knows “for a fact that she’s not a racist” and is thankful that she signed over the show.
“She had to sign a paper saying that she relinquished all her rights to the show so that we could go on,” the actor said. “I sent her an email and thanked her for that. I did not hear anything back, but she was going through hell at the time. And she’s still going through hell.”
The Conners premieres on ABC Tuesday, October 16, at 8 p.m. ET.
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