My Mother never liked Roseanne. She would not even sit and watch one whole episode with us. She thought the show was too rough, too rude and not really funny. I didn’t agree.

It wasn’t easy to look past your own Mother’s point of view and consider she could be wrong, but I saw more to Roseanne and I still enjoy watching the show when I find it coming on in re-runs on television.

It is true, Roseanne was not the sunny, generic situation comedy like so many others which resolved all their issues by the end of the show with a big group hug and boundless innocence filled with optimism. So many TV shows from the 80′s seemed to be created for people who carried a load of fluff in their heads. Reality TV hadn’t been invented yet. (Or if it was, no one would have watched something that unfluffy).

Roseanne was about a real family. Fictional characters but people you felt you could walk outside and meet.

Roseanne was not thin, she didn’t dress in fashionable clothes and her house was not something out of a magazine, though it was clean and usually tidy. Roseanne was about people who didn’t have money, they actually had debt, lost jobs and tried to deal with bill collectors. Roseanne worked in a factory and was harassed by her boss until she quit and then she didn’t have a job for awhile. She wasn’t rescued – she had to fix things herself. Roseanne worked as a waitress but by the last season of the show she was a small business owner and dealing with her Mother as a business partner.

Roseanne and Dan (her husband) were a good couple to watch. They did not have a fairytale romance. They fought but made it work out, by choice. I really loved that here was a TV show where a couple were not mysteriously wealthy without ever seeming to work – they were also not models, fit and slender but they could be happy and have a life together. They could live in the world, with the same problems I was dealing with and make things work.

More than anything else, Roseanne gave me hope for my own life because nothing was perfect in her world either and yet she could be happy and enjoy her life and her family and even (sometimes) her job/ career.