Roseanne: RoseamboABC
November 19, 1996
Sitcom
DVD
D+
Well, it's not the worst Roseanne episode, but it might be the furthest from the basic concept of the series. Written by two people who didn't work on any other of my shows (or do much else according to IMDB), this has Roseanne and some of her family accompanying Dr. Bakshi (Iqbal Theba again) to Washington, D.C. The train is hijacked by multi-ethnic misogynist terrorists from Monistat. (Yes, a yeast infection joke, and Roseanne defeats one terrorist with a tampon.) I know Barr would later claim that this episode was a metaphor for her dealings with men in Hollywood, but if she's making a feminist point, why are her mother and sister bigger ninnies than ever? Not that Mark and D.J. come across much better of course. (That even Sarah Chalke sat this one out tells you how little of a showcase it was for the rest of the cast.) The episode almost works as an action-movie parody, but it's too muddled. It's easily the strangest episode of the series where we're supposed to believe that these are real events in the lives of the Conner family, rather than some strange daydream.
Photographer Scott McKinley played a Party Guest earlier in the season. Not only does this have Steven Seagal, Don King, and Mike Tyson as themselves, and a professional Hillary Clinton impersonator, but poor Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, whom we last saw as himself on Ellen, plays a terrorist named Louis. Gary Halvorson had directed the "My Five Dads" episode of On the Television, but he was working with much better material then. We'll see how he does with his seven remaining Roseanne directing gigs.
