Although The Conners season 4 somewhat retconned and rewrote the circumstances of Jackie’s retirement from police work, the sitcom still kept part of Roseanne’s version of events in place. The Conners has never been certain about how the sitcom should best handle Roseanne. When The Conners started life in 1988, the sitcom was named Roseanne after its main character, Roseanne Barr’s Roseanne Conner.

However, when Barr was fired from the Roseanne revival in 2017, the show became The Conners and understandably began to struggle with its earlier episodes. Although The Conners works well when following new characters like Darlene’s children Harris and Mark, the Roseanne retooling has a hard time situating itself against its earlier iteration. With a Roseanne-shaped hole in its center, moments when The Conners characters reference scenes from Roseanne can feel odd and out-of-place at times.

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For example, when The Conners season 4, episode 12, “Hot For Teacher And Writing A Wrong,” explained why Roseanne’s sister Jackie quit the police force years earlier, some viewers were surprised to find that the version of events recounted on The Conners differed from the story previously established in Roseanne. After Jackie claimed she couldn’t stand seeing young people throw away their potential and left the police as a result, Dan claimed that the real reason The Conners heroine quit the force was that she shot herself in the leg and fell down the stairs. However, as some astute viewers noted, there is an existing Roseanne episode with a similar, but not identical, version of this story.

The Roseanne episode in question, “Goodbye Mr. Right,” (season 3, episode 5) did see Jackie injure herself by falling down the stairs while chasing a perp. However, as some canny viewers noted, there was no gunfire involved in Roseanne’s version of events. When Jackie claimed her assailant reached for a gun, her nurse noted that her partner said the suspect was nude when Jackie tackled him and fell down a flight of stairs in the process. The Conners returned to Mark’s storyline before getting further into the specific details of Jackie’s embarrassing escapade, but Dan’s recollection of events involved a firearm that is nowhere to be found in the original Roseanne story.

However, the two versions of events are still too similar for the retelling featured in The Conners to qualify as a wholesale retcon.  After all, at the end of the day, Jackie still fell down the stairs pursuing a suspect and injured herself, and her partner could have been joking to embarrass her by claiming the assailant was nude. Equally well, Dan may be exaggerating by adding the detail of Jackie shooting herself, although it is unlikely the headstrong heroine would let him get away with adding such an egregious embellishment. Whatever the case, it is unlikely that The Conners season 4 will mention Jackie’s police work again, meaning the cause of this Roseanne semi-retcon may never be fully resolved for fans.

The Conners releases new episodes every Wednesday on ABC.

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Cathal Gunning
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Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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