Sara Gilbert, Michael Fishman and John Goodman
October 18, 1988: Roseanne premieres on ABC. At the time, she was a feminist, blue-collar, and hated rich guys. A lot can change in 30 years.
The show was based on the standup comedy of Roseanne Barr. Although she was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, the show was based in the fictional town of Lanford, Illinois. Lanford was apparently outside Chicago, but it was no comfortable suburb: It was a run-down "Rust Belt" town, where factories had closed and laid people off.
Roseanne Barr played Roseanne Conner, formerly Roseanne Harris, a waitress at a diner. Eventually, she and a fellow waitress started their own diner, the Lanford Lunch Box. She was nasty and sarcastic, traits she inherited from her mother, Beverly (Estelle Parsons).
Her husband, Dan Conner (John Goodman), was a drywall contractor, who later ran a motorcycle shop. They had a few things in common: They were both fat and poor, and each could match the other for banter. And they each came from a broken home: Roseanne's father was a jerk and a womanizer, while Dan's mother was mentally ill, which left him emotionally stunted.
They had an older daughter, Becky (alternately played by Lecy Goranson and Sarah Chalke), who was more like Dan; a younger daughter, Darlene (Sara Gilbert, sister of Little House On the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert), who was athletic like Dan but, personality-wise, was just like Roseanne; a son, David Jacob, always referred to by his initials, D.J. (Michael Fishman); and, to reflect Roseanne's real-life pregnancy, 7 seasons into the show, another son, named Jerry in honor of Jerry Garcia, the lead singer of Roseanne's favorite band, The Grateful Dead, who had just died in real life.
Roseanne's sister, Jackie Harris (Laurie Metcalf) was in most episodes, and appeared to have more personal trauma from their rotten parents than Roseanne did: Unlike Roseanne, who married the first guy she ever dated (because she was pregnant), Jackie went through men like tissues, including an abusive boyfriend that Dan spent a night in jail for beating up, and an idiot husband with whom she had a child.
On July 25, 1990, the real Roseanne was invited to sing the National Anthem before a San Diego Padres game at Jack Murphy Stadium. In a conservative city with a large naval base, she yelled and screeched the Anthem, and got heavily booed.
In the 1995-96 season finale, Darlene married David, but Dan had a heart attack. In the 1996-97 season premiere, Dan recovered, and Roseanne won the lottery. They started splurging, and Dan had an affair. It all seemed so out of character. The show's ratings collapsed, and it was canceled. In the series finale, Roseanne is shown finishing a book, and says that the last season was her fantasy of what would have happened if Dan hadn't died from his heart attack.
At some point, the real Roseanne began veering to the political right, and became a supporter of Donald Trump, the kind of man that the 1988 version of Roseanne Conner would have hated -- on the basis of Trump's misogyny and his elitism.
In 2018, ABC revived Roseanne, with the same actors showing their characters' present-day lives. And the "retcon" was "retconned": Dan was alive and well, and there was no lottery win.
But after 1 season, Barr made a racist remark, and she, not the show, was canceled: The show was rebranded as The Conners, and it was revealed that Roseanne Conner had died due to her abuse of prescription drugs.
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October 18, 1988 was a Thursday. This was also the day DC Comics issued the issue of Batman: A Death in the Family in which Jason Todd, the 2nd Robin, died. I have a separate entry for that event.
Game 3 of the World Series was played at the Oakland Coliseum. The Oakland Athletics beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 2-1. Mark McGwire hit a game-winning home run for A's, just as Kirk Gibson of the Dodgers had in Game 1. That Gibson homer gave rise to the name "walkoff home run." This remains the only World Series with 2 walkoff homers. This turned out to be the only game the A's won in the Series.
Football was in midweek. The NBA season began 17 days later. There were 3 games played in the NHL:
* The New York Islanders beat the Vancouver Canucks, 3-2 at the Nassau Coliseum.
* The Pittsburgh Penguins beat their arch-rivals, the Pittsburgh Penguins, 4-2 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.
* And in an "Original Six" matchup and an arch-rivalry, the Detroit Red Wings beat the Chicago Blackhawks, 4-3 at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit. Steve Yzerman scored the winning goal, with 1 second left in overtime.
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