Lauren Graham (left) and Alexis Bleden in Gilmore Girls. Picture / Netflix
Lauren Graham (left) and Alexis Bleden in Gilmore Girls. Picture / Netflix
Roseanne unraveled in its final episodes.
The ABC sitcom received much praise for its honest portrayal of a blue-collar family in the eight years leading up to its 1996-97 season. It dominated ratings for a majority of those years and managed to attract 16 million viewers for its series finale. That is 16 million people, then, who witnessed the writers' attempt to undo the mess they had created throughout the preceding 22 episodes. (Spoilers ahead, but come on - two decades have passed.)
We were told that patriarch Dan (John Goodman) survived a heart attack at the end of the eighth season and that the Conners won $108 million in the Illinois State Lottery. The final season involves Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) partying with the wild Absolutely Fabulous duo, fighting train hijackers and even parodying Evita in a fantasy sequence.
Also a fantasy? Those 22 episodes, apparently. The finale reveals via voice-over that Dan actually died and Roseanne coped by working on her fanciful memoir: "When you're a blue-collar woman and your husband dies, it takes away your whole sense of security. So I began writing about having all the money in the world and I imagined myself going to spas and swanky New York parties just like the people on TV, where nobody has any real problems and everything's solved within 30 minutes."
That puts the Roseanne revival, which premiered Tuesday night, in a difficult position. The Conners still aren't millionaires, but now Dan is alive. It's as if the writers want us to forget the episode - heck, the whole season - ever happened.
Four other TV reboots, ranging from Gilmore Girls to American Idol, also disregarded the events of their original finales.
Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (revived by Netflix in 2016) Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino exited before the last season, and the Netflix revival gave her the opportunity to write a new ending for the show that had gone off the rails without her direction.
In the seventh season, Lorelai (Lauren Graham) gets married to her baby daddy, Christopher (David Sutcliffe), but they eventually break up and she gets back together with Luke (Scott Patterson). Rory (Alexis Bledel), gets rejected by the New York Times and ends up covering the Obama campaign instead.
Lauren Graham (left) and Alexis Bleden in Gilmore Girls. Photo / Netflix
The revival, which picks up a decade later, purposefully forgets those happy endings. Rory should have built a stellar portfolio following the campaign but somehow ends up in another crisis mode with only a handful of solid bylines. She presumably ended things with the insufferable Logan (Matt Czuchry) when she turned down his marriage proposal but still hooks up with him in the reboot. And even though we were gifted a Lorelai-Luke reunion after slogging through a season of Christopher, we once again find the duo facing problems that would have made more sense years ago.
Fuller House (revived by Netflix in 2016) Full House ended in 1995 with a strange episode called "Michelle Rides Again," which centres on the Tanner family's attempts to jog an amnesia-ridden Michelle's (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen) memory after she falls off a horse. But a smaller element remains inconsistent - and more upsetting - between this finale and the Fuller House revival, which aired more than 20 years later.
After DJ (Candace Cameron-Bure) spent the entire season trying to decide between two mediocre boyfriends, she eventually chooses neither and opts out of attending her senior prom. Michelle, even without her memory, finds this ridiculous and enlists DJ's best friend Kimmy (Andrea Barber) and Aunt Becky (Lori Loughlin) to find her sister a date. Surprise! It's Steve (Scott Weinger), who we know and love.
Fuller House picks up after DJ's firefighter husband - who is not Steve - dies, and she is left to raise their three children on her own. This was presumably to allow for Steve to be a future love interest while still allowing for a parallel to Pam Tanner's death in the original series, but it is still sad to think DJ spent all those years with some other guy.
Will & Grace (revived by NBC in 2017) In the original finale, which aired in 2006, Will (Eric McCormack) and Grace (Debra Messing) drift apart and raise children separately with their respective partners, Vince (Bobby Cannavale) and Leo (Harry Connick Jr.). The episode includes a huge time-jump, in which the two reunite 20 years later as they move their now-grown kids into dorm rooms across the hall from each other. The idea of Will and Grace spending that time apart felt weird, and the revival quickly tossed it out by using the oldest trick in the book.
Debra Messing returns as Grace for the rebooted Will and Grace.
In the opening scene, Karen (Megan Mullally) wakes up from dreaming that "Will was living with a swarthy man in uniform and Grace was married to a Jew doctor". That part was once true, Will tells her, but both couples have since split up. The part about having kids who grew up and got married, though? Absolutely not.
American Idol</strong> (revived by ABC in 2018) Fox announced in the spring of 2015 that the following year's season of American Idol would be its last. Past judges, winners and finalists came back for the emotional finale in May 2016. It was a Big Deal.
Less than two years later, the show is back on ABC. It picked up earlier this month, and host Ryan Seacrest is back with three new judges: Luke Bryan, Katy Perry and Lionel Richie. So should we just forget about all that "America picks its final idol" drama?
