Quit making sweeping pronouncements about Roseanne based on a few episodes!

Vulture

There have been all kinds of sweeping pronouncements about the Roseanne revival -- it's been called pro-Trump, anti-Trump and everything in between. The problem, says Kathryn VanArendonk, is that these arguments hang on a single joke, or episode. "I almost can’t believe I’m going to say this, because I firmly believe that it’s a good and useful thing to consider a single TV episode in a vacuum," she says. "That should be especially true for a sitcom, where episodes are largely stand-alone, and each of them has a cell-like tendency to be representative of the entire DNA of a series. And in many of those responses, especially of the third episode, have been biting, valuable acts of criticism. But in the case of Roseanne, the rush to say that the show is doing or arguing any one particular thing, and the willingness to hang those assertions on a single line in a single episode, is also flattening how we see the show. This is not meant as a defense of Roseanne, but a suggestion that maybe the show’s perceived failures have a lot to do with our incomplete understanding of how a sitcom works."

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