COMMENTARY : Does ‘Roseanne’ Rise Above It All? : This popular comedy about working stiffs sometimes doesn’t work at all

The war of attrition between commercial TV and what passes for the American cultural sensibility has drawn on for so long now that “Roseanne” has become an instant hit--the sixth highest-ranking TV show in the ratings--on a mere puddle of circumstance.

That “Roseanne” follows “Who’s the Boss?” in the Tuesday night 8-to-9 ABC slot can’t hurt. “Who’s the Boss?” is only one of any number of junk-food TV comedies that litter the networks in a rising subcontinent of oxygen-consuming trash. To watch it for any time is to fall victim to a hypoxia that leaves you gasping at the threshold of “Roseanne’s” roll of opening credits.

In contrast, “Roseanne” seems “real.” A fat hausfrau with a smart mouth, a standard litter of argumentative kids, a chronically unemployed husband (also given to excess girth), a piddling factory job and an indefatigably meddlesome sister--all combine to give us the illusion of the forgotten America that our recent presidential campaign resurrected out of the ashes of high-rolling Reaganomics: The private lives of the working stiffs who weren’t tapped for Morning in America.

That a badly written series jammed with post-feminist pop-over cliches featuring a star who possesses the minimal requirements of acting should meet with such swift public approval suggests something about our present state of TV comedy that borders the runic. Not that great writing should be a hallmark of notable television--literature tends to stop us in our tracks, whereas the best of TV comedy writing helps us pass time without regret. Nor does great acting figure in--nobody ranks Bill Cosby with Paul Robeson or James Earl Jones.

But “Roseanne” isn’t substantially connected to anything beyond TV’s worn-out wash of banal imagery and call-and-response one-liners. Its creators may have taken an unusual step in drafting Roseanne Barr for a sitcom (she bears the same kind of ambiguous relationship to her role that Mary Tyler Moore bore to Mary Richards), but the novelty stopped once the choice was made and they could settle into the same old thing. They brought in an anti-heroine--possibly conceived as a white Nell Carter or Marsha Warfield without the balefullness--and they didn’t know what to do with her except set her up in the same ding-dong tract inhabited by virtually every other half-hour sitcom on network television, except that this one’s a little more crowded and cluttered.

It’s been Roseanne Barr’s bad fate as a comedienne to be celebrated for her worst, or for bringing out the worst in her audience (which is becoming the performance norm these days). Ever since she broke on the scene several years ago, a get-real Denver housewife dreaming of better things from a trailer park, her truncated routines were impacted with the irritable one-liners of someone in a half-sleep. She played well to America’s defensive materialism and unhappy shallowness, and its spiritual and aesthetic dislocation. She was a low, fat, indolent gum-chewing misanthrope whose meows of disapproval were voiced in a monotone that was beyond arousal.

She was an instant heroine to all those females who were rubbed raw at trying to live up to the swift, bouncy images of the New Woman that swept through the media with enviably confident dispatch. She suggested that it was OK to stay home and feed your face and not worry about trying to be a Cosmo girl, or any kind of new, slimmed-down, dressed-for-success model of American beauty-with-brains, because the odds were you weren’t going to meet a better class of men anyway, and at heart you were just becoming another form of consumer. So why not just consume in the house?

That superficial glance of Barr was both a reward and a nightmare for women picking up on the fallout of the feminist revolt. In one respect her indolence masked a contempt for the rat race of making a living in an indifferent man’s world, and a tacit fatigue over the struggle--with which anyone stuck out there in the daily gridlock can identify.

But in another respect it fell far short of feminism’s underlying message: That women over the millennia had been disabused of the idea that they were closer to the essence of creation than men, that they possessed an innate wisdom of the flesh and were intuitively closer to the great religious teachings in that they understood the most potent of political powers to be the efficacy of love.

Only at the end of her full-length live routines, which most of us never got to see on television, did you hear her conclusion: You gotta love ‘em, no matter what. And try 30 years in the trench warfare of marriage before you complain. Only then did you understand that her plaint was like a soldier’s griping. You could grouse the day away; it was a way of letting off steam. But you never lost faith in the cause. Suddenly, she seemed heroic.

Vulgarity aside, it’s the shallow view of Barr that “Roseanne” gives us once again. The opening segment was characterized by a mean-spiritedness that took the form of reverse sexism when Barr held up a doughnut and said, “A guy is like a lump. First you gotta take off what his mom did to him. Then what the beer commercials show him. Then, his ego” (she took a proud, emasculating bite out of the doughnut). To a complaining daughter, she said, “This is why some animals eat their young.”

The assumption is that Roseanne, who holds down a full-time factory job, has the full-time family responsibility as well, since her unemployed husband (the very good actor John Goodman, wasted here) is too lazy and inept (“I’ll fix dinner,” he says in a later episode. “Oh, honey, you fixed dinner three years ago,” she coos sarcastically).

This male-bashing, incidentally, is epidemic in TV and is nowhere more acute than in “Roseanne.” Even her little boy gets it. After he accidentally knocks over his sister’s model of a castle, which she’d built for a school credit, the girl calls him “stupid.” He complains to Roseanne. “You’re not stupid,” she replies. “You’re just clumsy, like your daddy.”

There are any number of such references that don’t especially attach to character (Goldman is a graceful big man), or to plot. Maybe the show’s writers and producers haven’t been able to take off what their moms did to them.

There’s evidence to suggest that “Roseanne” was conceived, or re-conceived, as an updated version of the Jackie Gleason series, “The Honeymooners,” where we get a slice-of-life view of America’s true working class. Certainly the show wasn’t going to last as window dressing for Barr’s one-liners.

But you can see that the incestuous nature of TV comedy writing over the years has left us with a lost and anemic generation of writers who haven’t a clue about dramatic structure and character development; that is, the suggestion that here’s someone who possesses a point of view instead of merely playing attitude.

In every episode of “The Honeymooners” you saw a clear problem or dilemma--usually based on Ralph Kramden’s pompous assumptions rubbing up against Alice’s plain and better sense. In “Honeymooners,” no one was ever truly demeaned. Yet we saw powerful confrontations. At the end, Ralph and Alice’s reconciliations were touching because they had come out of the pitched battles of two strong-willed people.

Nobody confronts anyone else in “Roseanne” (the one universally disliked figure is Roseanne’s nosy and obtrusive sister, whose more egregious meddling is fended off with wisecracks). And all of the show’s plots so far have fizzled. In the meandering premiere episode, Roseanne had to deal with an airhead schoolteacher who was punishing Roseanne’s daughter “because she barks.” “But we all bark,” Roseanne protests--news to us, who heard nary a canine whimper.

In another episode, the show can’t make anything of a rare romantic night out between Roseanne and her husband (almost as a break in the tedium, Roseanne gets up and pours coffee for everyone in the restaurant). In another, the husband loses a local songwriting contest and more or less shrugs it off. “How do you tell people your songs weren’t good enough for two tickets to a lumber truck pull?” he muses.

Who cares? That’s why his loss and their concluding affection seem so trite. Nothing comes out of a struggle. They’ve never really suffered the bad air of a hard conjugal fight. They’ve never fought through anything serious to get to their goals or each other.

“Roseanne” is growing warmer and gentler, and Barr is becoming more expressive. But the show is still trying on different formulas to arrive at a comedy that will fit these characters and their circumstance in a way that ignites them into a plausible and affecting life. For as long as those formulas are restricted to the recycled hack devices we see almost everywhere else on network TV comedy, no amount of sarcastic one-liners or goosed-up studio audience response will save it from its inertia and disconnectedness. The show is still a

collection of throwaway lines.

“Roseanne’s” early popularity is probably based on a desperate hunger out there for something recognizable, as opposed to merely novel. But unless the show defines itself through the eyes of its characters--who are not post-modern ironists--America’s working class will continue to see itself as network TV sees it; that is, not at all.