Tears, Bang, Whimper, Laugh

The ending of two very different, second place shows

This past Wednesday (well, a few Wednesdays ago, this one didn’t get finished on timer), The Conners, the Revenant of the corpse of the Rosanne relaunch, finished its long, strange quest to avenge itself against the original Rosanne final season (and its own Everything That’s Old is New Again Rosanne relaunch existence), bringing real, earned, honest growth and closure to the family. It was a good ending for a strange, very strange… years ago I talked about how this must have been an insane show to write for… show that, I guess, was a bit of a hit? I don’t know, I don’t look at the ratings.
I loved Rosanne when I was a tween, in part because I had a crush on the character of Darleen, played by Sarah Gilbert… who, according to my ex, was her roommate for a summer SAT prep program or something along those academically overachieving lines.
Anyhow, I was curious about the Rosanne re-launch, but not enough to watch it due to not really wanting to support the titular star. The show’s original run was important TV in that it was about a poor family trying to get by, while also being a comedy. The lower-middle to working poor were not usually depicted in half hour sitcoms, at least not white sitcoms, and that spoke to me, being working poor/lower middle class.

Again, also, the Darleen crush.

Anyhow, when the show re-re-launched as The Conners it was with Darleen in the lead, and I gave it a go… and watched all of it. I don’t know if I liked it, but I didn’t hate it. It was a compelling mess full of insane cameos, and lots of performers I enjoyed.

Also, Rosanne (the character) was written off via dying of a prescription painkiller overdose, something always present, but not usually centered, which means The Conners was at least nominally am opioid crisis show.

It wasn’t the best opioid crisis show, that was the Dopesick miniseries on Hulu, and it also probably wasn’t the best Rosanne show either, that was probably the original.

(And, given that this piece got finished later than planned, it might not even be the best John Goodman plays a widower show as The Righteous Gemstones also came to an end. The question coming out of that though is, how good was The Righteous Gemstones, but that’s a question for another day.)

Another opioid crisis show ended earlier this year, one you’ve probably never heard of, one that got three seasons on STARZ and seems to have been removed from their platform.. no idea if it’s getting picked up somewhere else… This show, a show that must have also been just as insane to write for as The Conners, High Town, ended the way it lived, answering the question, “What if Showtime had made The Wire?”

For some of you, you know exactly what that means, for others, let me explain:

Showtime, at the peak of its powers, made melodramatic, horny, absurd and over the top television that played at, and occasionally was, smart and/or good… while being broadly entertaining the rest of the time.

So Hightown, set in Provincetown Mass, was really like a dumb, horny, and entertainingly sensationalistic version of The Wire (the single greatest TV Drama ever made).

I watched the shit out of the first two seasons of Hightown, in a mix of joy, bafflement, and genuine interest….

Okay, yes, I do think I actually liked The Conners, not like an all time favorite, but I found joy in the show, joy in its messy art, and that’s the way I felt about Hightown.

Anyhow, it was no Wire, but it was a good, utterly insane ride, and there were a lot of opioids (and other drugs) and crises, so just like The Conners it was a second best version of itself twice over.

And now, as messy, and insane, and watchable as they both were, as truly ambitious and at times bold as they both were, they’re over.

There’s a question we ask a lot when we talk about art, “What’s it about?”

We ask this in regards to plot, themes, subtext and the Big T and little t T/truth of the work.

Almost 12 years ago now, during my first quarter at Evergreen, Professor David Marr, one of the original faculty, brought this question up and said, “Instead of asking what it’s about, ask what it does.”

And so, for the life of both of those shows, I’ve been asking just what the fuck they were trying to do, and I think the answer is that they were trying to do was be what they were required to be by their networks, and be more and less than what anyone would have thought they were at a first glance.

You guys, Hightown is fucking insane, and The Conners is uniformly incongruous, and both of them, both of them, are informed by the opioid crisis. They’re both shows that tried to exist and thrive in our modern TV landscape, existing where they were slotted, but unsure of where and what that slot was.

They’re both over now, and for all their chaos and carnage, TV was better for both of them, because the thing that kept me coming back to both of them was their quest to do, or say, or be something creative and honest.