29 Years Later, The Most Devastating Retcon In Sitcom History Is Still Hard To Take

Published Sep 26, 2026, 7:45 AM EDT

Zach Moser has been writing for ScreenRant since 2022, covering movies, classic TV, and streaming TV. His areas of expertise cover a wide range of genres with a particular interest in horror and drama, and the conversations around the TV and film industry. When he's not covering the latest film releases or chronicling the latest season of a new show, he's writing humor pieces for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Slackjaw, and Points In Case or working on short stories and his second novel. 

It's been 29 years, and the retcon at the end of this beloved sitcom is still difficult to take. There have been some rough endings to network TV shows over the decades. In their defense, most network showrunners probably didn't foresee the streaming age and know their shows would be watched over and over, with countless discussions to boot.

Will & Grace, Quantum Leap, Star Trek: Enterprise, and St. Elsewhere often rank among the most hated TV endings. That doesn't always mean these endings are terrible, but sometimes they feel like the showrunners flipping the bird to the audience, not caring about the fans who've been watching for years.

Roseanne is one of those series finales that feels like it was made specifically to mess with the viewers who had been with the show since 1988 when it premiered. The ABC sitcom ran for 10 seasons and stars Roseanne Barr as Roseanne Conner, the matriarch of the Conner family, a working-class family in Illinois.

Roseanne and her husband Dan (John Goodman) both work and raise their three children, just barely getting by on their two blue-collar incomes. Roseanne was notable as one of the first American sitcoms to nail what it actually meant to be a typical working-class family.

Roseanne and Dan both work, are frequently in dire straits, and don't look like your typical sitcom leads. Throughout the series, the Conners faced all the typical problems families faced in the decade and are still facing today. It was a successful and highly acclaimed show that viewers could connect with, until the series finale.

Almost every season of Roseanne shares a similar structure, as do most sitcoms. There are issues, jokes, and characters come and go, but nothing substantial changes. Season 9, the last at the time, features some significant changes. Two of the most notable are the Conner's winning a $108 million lottery, and Dan having an affair.

Then in the final episode, the entire season is wiped away, along with much of the rest of the series. The show suddenly transitions, and it's revealed that the series is actually a book being written by the real Roseanne, based on her life. She's changed a lot from her personal history, particularly in regard to the events of the final season.

In reality, Dan died from his season 8 heart attack, and the entirety of season 9 has been Roseanne's grief-filled musings. It's unclear how much of the show she has made up, considering we see some other irregularities, like that it's Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) who has been a lesbian all this time, not her sister Bev (Estelle Parson).

The episode ends on a downer note, with Roseanne explaining that writing about Dan's infidelity was a way to express her anger at him for dying. It is as unexpected as it sounds. There was no hint that this was the direction Roseanne was heading in, and all these years later, it still feels like someone's telling you to look at a mustard stain on your shirt.

This Ending Had A Major Impact On Roseanne’s Legacy

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The ending of Roseanne has a major impact on the show's legacy. It was an acclaimed series while it was on, and you don't hear about it much anymore. It rarely appears in any rankings of the best sitcoms of the era. When they revived the series in 2017, they had to do another retcon, in fact, to disregard everything that was shown in that season 9 finale.