The First Trailer For ‘The Conners’ Is Here — And It Doesn’t Mention Roseanne Barr At All

It feels like we’ve been waiting forever to get a sense of what The Conners is going to be like without Roseanne Barr at its center. And now, ABC has released the show’s first trailer that’s filled with new footage that pretty quickly provides an answer to that question: it’s still going to be funny. Thanks to the perfect delivery of lines from actors like Sara Gilbert and Laurie Metcalf (and no doubt John Goodman, though he doesn’t have dialogue in this one), it really does convey the sense of a family that, following a tragedy, has to come together and move forward as best they can. 

Watch the new trailer below! 

https://twitter.com/TheConnersABC/status/1047212173498310661

As we get nearer to the Oct. 16 debut of The Conners, it’s a perfect opportunity to also take a look at ABC’s previously released teaser trailers for the new series. In the first three, we were given glimpses of the outside of the family home, the living room, and the kitchen. The fourth (watch below) starts with a black screen, followed by character names and snippets of dialogue from each of them (all coming from last season’s episodes of Roseanne). It ends with the same phrase as the others, “What’s Next?”

That question, in some ways, is becoming a pretty important one. What started off as the issue of how they would write the Roseanne character out of the show, turned into one of surprise when John revealed that the character will have died between the end of Roseanne and the start of The Conners. That in turn has turned into controversy with Roseanne’s announcement in an interview that her character has died of an opioid overdose. There are a lot of fans of the show that really dislike that idea, not the least of which is Roseanne herself, who commented in part, “It wasn’t enough to [fire me], they had to so cruelly insult the people who loved that family and that show.” 

Watch The Conners teaser trailer video below!

At this stage, it’s going to be the challenge of the show’s cast and writers to prove it can move beyond what’s come before. Part of that required promos that that actually feature clips from this season, showing the Conner family coping with their loss (with humor, of course) and giving us a real taste of what the show is going to be as it moves off in this new direction. Obviously that has started to happen with the latest trailer release.