Tornado Alley (PROG)

[JimLur]

Roseanne revival is a wake-up call for Hollywood
By John Podhoretz
March 28, 2018 | 7:58pm | Updated

At the beginning of March, the Academy Awards featured performers talking about “intersectionality” and Dreamers and jokes about how an Oscar-nominated movie about a gay awakening was made to annoy Mike Pence — and the show got the lowest ratings in history.

Tuesday night, the premiere episode of the revival of “Roseanne” featured a working-class grandmother saying grace before dinner and concluding with thanks for “making America great again” — and the show got the highest ratings of any network program in six years.

Hollywood is now faced with indisputable evidence that there’s a huge potential audience out there for programs that don’t actively insult 63 million Trump voters.

It might seem easy to dismiss the “Roseanne” numbers as the result of audience nostalgia and excitement. But consider this: The TV world was thrilled when the reboot of “Will and Grace” was watched by 15 million people, especially since “Will and Grace” is exactly the kind of woke urban show the TV world loves.

But “Roseanne” blew “Will and Grace” away; its audience was 20 to 25 percent larger. And the original “Roseanne” went off the air 20 years ago, a decade before “Will and Grace” took its initial final bow. It might have just been old news. But boy oh boy, it isn’t.

One might also point out that the first “Roseanne” episode on Tuesday (ABC aired two) was absolutely sensational. Bruce Rasmussen’s script centered on a political feud between the Trumpy Roseanne and her Hillary-centric sister Jackie — and it was funny and barbed and fair, unquestionably one of the best renderings of the cross-ideological tension in America since Trump came down the escalator nearly three years ago.

But of course the people who watched in droves couldn’t have known the episode was going to be good. They might, however, have seen the news reports about Roseanne Barr’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show last week, when he complained to her that she had once been so liberal.

Barr, who remains among the most confrontational people on earth, was having none of it.

“I’m still the same,” she shouted. “You all moved!” And she yelled at him about how his hunger to get rid of Trump would just leave an opening for the very same Mike Pence whom Kimmel had made fun of in his Oscar monologue.

“A lot of us, no matter who we voted for, we don’t want to see our president fail,” Barr said. “Because we don’t want Pence!”

So what America might have known about the new “Roseanne” before tuning in was that it was going to be the very rarest of birds at this cultural moment — a Hollywood product that wasn’t going to use Trump as a punchline or use a Trump supporter as a comic punching bag.

Perhaps more important, her appearance signaled that the new “Roseanne” was going to be true to the spirit of the old. The original show was properly hailed as a detailed depiction of the lives of the American working class — and if any fictional characters of the past 30 years were going to vote for Trump, it was going to be the Conners.

Indeed, it was precisely people like Dan and Roseanne Conner whose votes for Trump made the difference in the election (although the Conners live in Illinois, which voted for Hillary).

Another way in which the new “Roseanne” gets it right was revealed in the second episode that aired Tuesday night. They have to deal with the fact that their 9-year-old grandson seems to have a taste for cross-dressing. And although Dan arms him with a penknife so he can defend himself, he does so only because he fears for the boy’s safety, not because he is sickened by the kid’s behavior.

As Henry Olsen has written, “these voters are not motivated by social issues. They are, as the conservative Canadian political analyst Patrick Muttart says, ‘morally moderate’ . . . Donald Trump’s lack of a firm grounding in traditional Republican social policy was, for these voters, a plus.” (This might help explain Roseanne Barr’s shriek of horror at Jimmy Kimmel that his effort to get Trump might cause a Pence presidency.)

The world between the coasts has just sent a message to the major domos of our popular culture. The message is: We’re conscious enough of our differences to shut you down when you set yourselves against us (the Oscars) but we are ready to provide enthusiastic support for your efforts if you treat us with respect.

How will Hollywood respond?

[e-mail]

https://nypost.com/2018/03/28/roseanne-revival-is-a-wake-up-call-for-hollywood/