The current wave of television nostalgia has brought with it some successes and some failures, as reviving old favourites is likely to do. The rebooted Gilmore Girls, for example, was a strangely cold and unlovable affair, while Will & Grace has adapted itself to the modern age in a way that surprised those sceptical that its more neutered 90s incarnation would be at odds with today’s all-out-there confessional times. For a show that took until midway through its second season to even show two men (not lovers, but friends) kissing on the lips, Will & Grace is now bursting with risque gags and political bite, and it’s been a hit. It’s fresh because it has shifted its shape around its original template, and it feels as if there’s a reason for it to exist again.

When good TV goes bad: how Roseanne’s dream turned into a nightmare Read more

Is the same true for Roseanne? The series first aired 30 years ago, and its working-class comedy was blunt, down-to-earth and honest, particularly when it came to showing the reality of being broke. By the time it ended in 1997, it had collapsed into absurdity, with a self-flagellating final season in which the Conners won millions on the state lottery. There were cameos from Absolutely Fabulous’s Eddy and Patsy, but the last episode revealed the show to be a fiction written by Roseanne as a way of coping with Dan’s death from a heart attack. The old theory that entertainment should be aspirational appeared to have caught up with a show that was so likable because it had resolutely rejected that.

There’s no way it could stand in the reboot, so that storyline is quickly dispensed of using similar tricks, with the whole fiasco revealed as an old screenplay languishing in the garage that nobody picked up. “Dan? I thought you were dead,” cracks Roseanne, one of a trickle of in-jokes served up for old fans of the series, which are largely wry, and not too heavy-handed. The humour of the original, and particularly its earlier seasons, is faithfully replicated in that same way. The jokes are cutting, but only in the way that you’d playfully insult a family member. There’s an overall message of acceptance, that most things can be fixed with a conversation and a hug, though there’s enough acidity to cut through any saccharine and simplistic notion that love trumps all.

In today’s Roseanne, the family is at war, as much as it can ever be. Ex-cop Jackie voted for “the worst person alive”, and she’s got the pussy hat to prove it. Roseanne and Dan supported Trump because he promised jobs. Barr has discussed her own support for Trump before, and amid much controversy, but the decision to give fictional Roseanne the same political leanings seems as matter-of-fact as the show was in its heyday. And as the Conners’ life plays out, it’s neither better nor worse under the Trump administration.

Darlene has returned home because she’s divorced and out of work; Becky is so strapped for cash that she’s attempting to become a surrogate (in a nice nod, for a woman played by Sarah Chalke, who picked up the role of Becky from Lecy Goranson, now back, in 1993). You get the sense that the family’s slide from being broke to really broke began long before the present, but you also get the sense that nothing much is changing. Take the price of medication: “You get half the drugs for twice the price.” It doesn’t begin to touch on race, however, and that’s one of the few points about its political jocularity that jars; perhaps it will address this in episodes to come.

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Age is a recurring theme, and there’s a vein of sadness drawn from that which provides more heart than the acerbic political back-and-forths. Darlene has not managed to be the writer she hoped she would become. “I thought I could buy a huge house and hold that over your head,” she says, bleakly, of her return home. Dan and Roseanne are getting old, and celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary, and they’re still juggling credit cards to make ends meet. “Do you get points on your credit card?” asks Darlene. “We get threats: is that the same thing?” Roseanne shoots back.

There are moments in which the new showrunners Bruce Helford and Whitney Cummings attempt to drag the Conners into the present. There’s a storyline about Darlene’s young son, Mark, who prefers pink leggings and painted nails to plaid shirts and cargo shorts, and Roseanne and Dan have to learn to trust his own sense of who he is. But really, it’s at its most comfortable when it’s playing the old notes. The jokes are dry and scrape the surface of meanness, while never lacking warmth; Becky is as bratty as ever, while Darlene is as vicious, though JD, now a soldier back from a stint in Syria, barely gets a look-in. It all comes together to make this a fine comedy in parts, even good at times, and it’s a relief in many ways that it doesn’t try to be more.