Warning: contains spoilers for the April 16th episode of The Conners.
The cold open of this week’s episode of The Conners — “Danny Boy, the Interview, the New Hire and the Hanging Chad” — quickly reminds us of the many storylines currently active on the show. Mark (Ames McNamara) is still making money as a hacker; his mother, Darlene (Sara Gilbert), has kicked him out of the house over it. Dan (John Goodman) is pursuing a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company that made the opioids the character of Roseanne used to induce a fatal overdose after the actor who played her was fired from the show. Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) is trying to rejoin the local police force, despite her advanced age. And Darlene’s husband Ben (Jay R. Ferguson) is so consumed launching a new magazine that Darlene barely sees him, and has been replacing his company with Chad (Seth Green), a platonic friend she made at the Lobo Lounge.
Amid the chaos, Becky (Alicia Goranson) has been working away at her Master’s degree, and now has a shot at a very prestigious job in her field — which, by the time the episode ends, she has secured. Becky’s plot may be one of Season Seven’s least showy, but that just means she really earned this win.
Though you might expect that Darlene would be the Conner touchstone for someone who now makes her living broadcasting her opinions, I always identified more with Becky. When Roseanne started, we were both responsible, grade-grubbing, rule-following 13-year-olds frequently enlisted to babysit younger siblings for our busy working parents. We even both had perms. Becky’s path and mine diverged when she met Mark (Glenn Quinn), an archetypal bad boy — leather jacket! motorcycle! hair in his eyes! — I would have been too scared to talk to after years of crushing on boys I knew from marching band.
It’s assumed that Becky will be the first Conner to get a college degree, but when she finds out that her parents’ failed bike shop has consumed what was to have been her college fund, she ends up leaving home, following Mark to a job in Minnesota and eloping. (It’s around this time that the show recast Becky with Sarah Chalke while Goranson went to college.) Getting the life she wants is harder for Becky after she derails her academic plans, which is just one reason she sometimes wonders whether getting married at 17 was a mistake.
When Becky returns in 2018’s Roseanne revival, real-life events have to be accommodated: Quinn having died in 2002, Becky is a widow, and making a living is even harder as a 43-year-old in the late 2010s. Becky considers becoming a gestational surrogate, despite her age; then, in the first season of The Conners, it turns out that could have been a good career path given that she has unprotected sex with Emilio (Rene Rosado) once, only for an unplanned pregnancy to ensue. But the baby isn’t an unalloyed joy: Emilio is picked up in an ICE raid and deported back to Mexico until he crosses back to the U.S. again illegally. Becky deals with single motherhood — or, rather, doesn’t — by developing a substance dependency that eventually leads her to in-patient rehab. It’s a tough few years, but it helps lead Becky to her professional calling: psychology, which she enrolls in college to pursue.
If the best fate for a character in this franchise is to have the dullest storyline, Becky has been killing the game for a while. In the current season, Becky has a stable relationship with Tyler (Sean Astin), who flies jets for a courier company. She has seemingly reliable care for her mostly off-screen daughter, Beverly Rose (Charlotte Sanchez). She shares a large and comfortable house with Darlene and her family. She’s been confident in her sobriety. Sure, there’s the possibility that the show’s writers have just run out of tragedies to throw at her, but isn’t it nicer to pretend she’s figured things out?
This week, it’s Becky’s turn to have a shot at a big job: a tech company is creating a mental wellness department for employees and a professor recommended her. (Of course it’s the kind of place that has exercise balls for office seating, and of course Becky’s not prepared to use one herself.)
Advised by Darlene to try mirroring her interviewer so that he’ll see himself in her and be more likely to hire her, Becky seizes on the opening he gives her by saying he remembers her from an AA meeting. “No one gets pregnant on a freezer in a one-night stand, or blacks out and loses their kid, or is so out of it that they don’t know their mother is hooked on painkillers without learning a couple of things — I mean, I’m sure you have your own stories!” Sven (Brian Byrnes) tells her he was only there to support a friend, and this is the first time he’s hearing any of these gems from Becky’s past. “Of course you know that addicts always exaggerate,” Becky tries to cover. “We have a saying: take everything I say with a gram of coke!”
Sven must respect Becky’s honesty and candor and appreciate how her manner would encourage his employees to open up to her, because she gets the job heading the wellness division, at a salary of “a lot.” “What’s a lot?” Dan asks. “A lot for a Conner or a lot for a guy who could buy four new tires at once?” “Four new tires, and a spare!” Becky cheers. For a girl who grew up watching her parents shuffle bills according to which ones they could afford to be late on — and who, as a woman, has probably had to do it herself — this is a huge accomplishment.
In the pandemic fall of 2020, Becky and Darlene were nervous about failing to land jobs at Wellman Plastics — a company where Roseanne and Jackie worked in the early going of the original series, and quit in protest of terrible labor conditions. Since then, we’ve watched the Conner sisters struggle to maintain hope that they’d ever land a job that could give them some social mobility and an easier future for their children.
Darlene isn’t out of the woods yet: There are still two episodes left in which she could destroy her marriage by going hard after Chad. But as for Becky? If she can just gain some core strength, she’ll be unstoppable.
