For nine seasons on ABC, from 1988 to 1997, Roseanne and Dan Conner were the most believable married couple on television. They argued over bills and teased each other across a cluttered Lanford kitchen table, and if you watched with your own family, you probably saw a little of yourselves in that house. Now Roseanne Barr, 73, has a new sitcom of her own, and she wanted the man who played Dan to be part of it.
Barr told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published October 20 that the invitation went out through her son. What John Goodman, 74, said in reply, and what Barr says about the old cast today, closes a door many fans hoped was still open.
How Did the Conner Family Fall Apart?
The break came just as the family seemed whole again. ABC brought Roseanne back in March 2018 with Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert and the rest of the original cast, and the network quickly ordered another season. Then on May 29, 2018, Barr posted a tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. ABC canceled the show that same day, and ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey called the tweet “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values,” according to ABC News and Today. Barr apologized and deleted it, but the revival was over.
The cast went on without her. The Conners premiered that October, and in its first episode, “Keep On Truckin’,” the family learned that Roseanne Conner had died of an opioid overdose. Barr called that choice “grim and morbid,” according to CNN and Good Morning America. Goodman carried Dan Conner through seven more seasons before the show signed off on April 23, 2025, with a final episode called “The Truck Stops Here” that sent Dan to visit his late wife’s grave.
That ending gave Goodman one last scene with the woman he had played opposite since the Reagan years, even though she was nowhere near the set. Off camera, the two had long since stopped talking.
What Has John Goodman Said About Roseanne Barr?
Goodman has never piled on. At the Monte-Carlo Television Festival in 2023, he told Variety that working with Barr had been a great time. “And I love her,” he said, adding that she is “just her own person.” Asked whether he would ever work with her again, he was honest about not knowing. “If she’d like to… I just don’t know,” he said, as Fox News reported at the time.
Two years later, the distance had a number. Goodman told The Hollywood Reporter in July 2025 that the pair “haven’t talked for about seven or eight years,” as People reported. “I’d rather doubt if she wants to talk to me,” he said. He still remembered the good years warmly. “We hit it off from jump street,” Goodman said. “She made me laugh, and I made her laugh, and wow, it was so much fun.”
He has also been candid about how hard those years were on him personally. At a recent SAG-AFTRA Foundation talk, he admitted the sudden fame of the show overwhelmed him, as DYR covered in John Goodman’s reflections on ‘Roseanne’ fame. Barr, meanwhile, had a new project in the works that she hoped would bring him back into her orbit.
What Is Roseanne Barr’s New Sitcom?
The show is called Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable, an eight-episode, single-camera comedy that Barr filmed in Austin, Texas, with money raised from private investors, according to TV Insider. She plays the matriarch of a mixed-race family of preppers loosely based on her own life in Texas, and she described the character to The Hollywood Reporter as “a really wacky old lady.” Then she added, “I’m a prepper,” as Parade reported.
The cast includes Drea de Matteo of The Sopranos as her daughter and Omar Gooding as her son-in-law, plus Randy Quaid, the Vacation star, as her love interest. The episodes are finished, but as of this week the series has no network or streaming home, and Barr says she is still looking for a distributor, according to Parade and the National Enquirer.
A cameo from the man who played Dan Conner would have been the kind of news that sells a show like this. So Barr’s son picked up the phone.
What Did John Goodman Say to Roseanne Barr’s Son?
He said no. “My son called Goodman and asked him to do a cameo on Meemaw and he declined,” Barr told The Hollywood Reporter. Goodman has not commented publicly on the request or on her remarks.
Barr was just as blunt about the rest of her old television family. Asked whether she gets along with Goodman or Laurie Metcalf, who won three Emmys as Aunt Jackie, she answered, “I don’t.” Asked whether they are in contact at all, she said, “Of course not,” according to the National Enquirer and Parade. That fits what DYR reported last month, when Barr’s falling-out with the actor who played D.J. resurfaced in her renewed feud with Michael Fishman, and what Chuck Lorre recalled about the show’s chaotic early days.
Still, the woman who built the Conner house did not sound angry when she talked about losing it. When she spoke about Goodman and Metcalf, now 71, she ended on a line that may stay with longtime fans the longest. “Nobody is more brokenhearted than me,” Barr told The Hollywood Reporter. “I just choose to remember the fun and the good times.”