‘The Conners’ Season 2 Is a Raw and Real Reminder of What a Great Sitcom Looks Like

Thinking back to the Twitter tornado that ripped Roseanne out of its primetime foundation and dropped The Conners on us last year, it was easy to assume that TV’s first family would never be able to rebuild—and you wouldn’t be able to blame them, either! The circumstances surrounding Season 1 of The Conners were nothing short of the sitcom equivalent of a natural disaster, a months-long controversy that drew scrutiny from all over. The Conners Season 1 was a solid start, made shaky only because none of us–possibly the cast and crew included–were sure about the integrity of this new foundation. Now in Season 2, the cast, crew, and audience can sleep soundly, because the foundation is solid.

The Conners Season 2 is good. Not just good, it’s italics-worthy good. Season 1 was a season of mourning, a balancing act between catharsis and humor that was remarkable to watch unfold every week. But Season 2? The first two episodes given to the press for review show that the Conners are ready to play again. They have life again. They’ve moved on from mourning, and the show hits new highs because of it.

This is the show we all wanted when Roseanne came back for Season 10 in early 2018. The short-lived revival and even The Conners‘ debut season felt somewhat stilted. The shows rarely felt like an ensemble; instead, the cast—including legends like John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf—sometimes felt overshadowed by their firebrand scene partner or her absence. It oftentimes felt like the cast wasn’t all in the same place at the same time—possibly literally because of the busy schedules of all the A-list cast members.

That’s not the case in The Conners Season 2. Now with 20 episodes of this revival era in the can, the cast is once again operating at peak performance. The staginess that’s become a stereotype of multi-cam sitcoms since Roseanne first went off the air is not welcome in the Conner household. Goodman, Metcalf, Sara Gilbert, Lecy Goranson—these are professionals that came up in a golden age of sitcoms. They trust the jokes and their delivery so much that they never mug to the audience or oversell a line. In fact, they continually undersell the jokes, weaving them into exposition and set-ups with an ease that makes the Conners feel like funny people and not funny characters. I know this is what great comedic actors are supposed to do, but it’s so rarely done on multi-cams in 2019, let alone done this well.

The new cast—although it feels weird still calling them “new” after all this time—also get moments to shine. That’s particularly the case with Darlene’s son Mark (Ames McNamara), a gender-nonconforming gay kid the likes of which I don’t think we’ve ever seen in a series regular role on a network multi-camera sitcom. Season 2 finds Mark entering adolescence and actually, you know, being gay. Mark gets to do what 12-year-olds have been doing in sitcoms for decades: he gets the innocent middle school relationships that straight people take for granted and gay people have never been able to see on TV.

Particularly great is Goodman’s onscreen rapport with McNamara. In a beautiful development, Dan Conner has become the kind of supportive grandpa that every gay person wishes he had growing up. But also, The Conners knows what it’s doing with Mark is groundbreaking, and they use the fact that we never see characters like him on stage in front of an audience and three cameras to say something new and relevant.

Because of this, The Conners finally feels like the modern day Roseanne we’ve been waiting for. It’s a show where bad luck and good jokes go hand in hand and no struggle gets a tidy resolution by episode’s end. Like the best years of Roseanne, The Conners Season 2 shows life for what it really is to millions of Americans: an exhausting grind that you survive because of the weird and wonderful people that you hold close to your heart.

Stream The Conners on Hulu