Trump Effect Hits Roseanne, Sitcom Coming Back To TV!

Were you a fan of the old TV sitcom Roseanne?

I have to admit, I was not. Wasn’t really my style.

But if you haven’t kept track of Roseanne recently, you might be very surprised to learn she’s a supporter of many Trump policies and has famously said we need to give him a chance! And by the way, doesn’t she look fantastic now?

At AFP, we call this is the Trump Effect. The Trump Effect is a law of cause and effect. Since Trump first entered the race in 2015, we’ve seen people who support Trump (and Trump himself) receive an almost unnatural bump in life. Things just go well for them. They get new deals, new money, new fans. Their careers revive. Trump himself beat Hillary despite polls saying he was down 91% on election day.

The reverse is that those who attack Trump find their attack boomerangs back on them. See Jeb, Lindsey Graham, Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Hillary, Alyssa Milano, Kathy Griffin….you get the idea.

The bottom line, attack Trump at your own risk! And if you’re looking for a boost, join the Trump Train! We’re making America great again, get on board and benefit!

So the latest is Roseanne Barr. First, she r when Griffen attacked Trump. Then she made several pro-Trump statements, saying “give the man a chance, I hope he does great!” Thank you Roseanne! More on that here.

And now the Trump Effect has reciprocated. Roseanne just got picked up by ABC and is coming back to TV! Even industry “experts” are stunned by the move.

Here are more details, from MarketWatch:

Roseanne Barr is returning to her old sitcom. But will anything look the same?

Two decades after the seminal sitcom, “Roseanne,” appeared on ABC on Oct. 18, 1988 and became a voice of working-class Americans for a generation, it’s coming back for an eight-episode run on the same network. And it comes on the heels of an election season dominated by discussions of income inequality and the struggles of the middle class.

The original series centered on the s, a working class family living in the fictional town of Lanford, Ill. When the show premiered, Roseanne (played by Roseanne Barr) was a mother of three who worked in a plastics factory. Her husband Dan (John Goodman) made his living as a drywall contractor.

Mortgage interest rates are much better for families in 2017, but income and unemployment levels are not so different. And if she were unemployed today, the Roseanne Conner wouldn’t have a factory job to turn back to. The Conners family would still be struggling.
During its run, “Roseanne” focused on the trials and tribulations faced by families in Middle America — it wasn’t uncommon for episodes to center on having the electricity cut or scrimping to pay a child’s college tuition. “Here was a post-Reaganite economic critique with belly laughs — trickle-down sitcommery,” Ken Tucker, then a television critic for “Entertainment Weekly,” wrote in a review of the show’s seventh season.

The original cast — Barr, Goodman, Sara Gilbert (Darlene), Michael Fishman (D.J.), Lecy Goranson (Becky) and Laurie Metcalf (Jackie) — will all return to their blue-collar roots. Sarah Chalke, who also played Becky for four years of the show’s original run, will also reportedly star as another character.

The cast may be the same, but a lot has changed since 1997 when “Roseanne aired its final episode. Mortgage interest rates are much better for families in 2017, but income and unemployment levels are not so different. “You would have to show them struggling even more,” said Heather Boushey, executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank founded by John Podesta, former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. “And you’d probably talk a lot more about debt,” she added.

So what has changed in the U.S. since the show premiered in 1988? MarketWatch breaks it down:

Economically, things have not improved for the working class in recent years — if anything, they’ve gotten worse. These days there’s a good chance that Barr and Goodman’s characters would be out of work or making less money. The median salary for drywall installers (Dan Conner’s profession) has fallen after adjusting for inflation from $48,000 in 1997, the year the show went off the air, to roughly $41,000 today, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As for Roseanne Conner, after leaving the factory and working odd jobs, she eventually opened a “loose meat” sandwich restaurant with her sister and a friend during the fifth season. While the idea that most restaurants close in the first year is a myth, the median lifespan for an eatery is only 4.5 years, according to a 2014 report by researchers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the University of California, Berkeley.

The housing market downturn would have also hit the Conner family hard. Illinois had one of the largest legacy foreclosure inventories in the country at the end of 2016 and home values have not recovered as readily in the Midwest as in other parts of the country.
If she were unemployed today, Roseanne wouldn’t have a factory job to turn back to, according to John Russo, the former director of the Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio. “She’d be a contingent worker,” said Russo, also a visiting scholar at Georgetown University. These days there’s a need to have multiple part-time jobs just to make ends meet for many people.”

The housing market downturn would have also hit the Conner family hard. Illinois had one of the largest legacy foreclosure inventories in the country at the end of 2016 according to real estate data company ATTOM Data Solutions, and home values have not recovered as readily in the Midwest as in other parts of the country. In fact, the Indiana property used for exterior shots in the show went up for sale in 2013 at a list price of $129,000, but is now only estimated to be worth $80,374, according to Realtor.com.

The revived series will also need to contend with myriad cultural and political changes that have occurred in the intervening decades. “Many of these communities have been in a major period of transition both economically and demographically,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute. “For it to be culturally accurate, the series will need to depict greater diversity.”

Besides being groundbreaking for its depiction of class issues, “Roseanne” was heralded for showcasing actors (Barr and Goodman) who were overweight. The New York Times review of the show’s pilot included the following (cringe-inducing) line: “Together Roseanne and Dan are a fetching pair of chubbies who think, with ample justification, that they’re pretty cute.”

While in 1990, no state had an obesity rate equal to or above15%, these days no state has an obesity rate below 20%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While these kinds of harsh attitudes to people who are overweight may or may not have changed since 1988, there’s been far more research into the effects of obesity on health and mortality. And being overweight is no longer as rare as it was in the late 1980s. While in 1990, no state had an obesity rate equal to or above 15%, these days no state has an obesity rate below 20%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.