re: #147 Belafon

I think the reason they chose Roseanne was because it would appeal to a lot of the people they were hoping to communicate with. Not a single one of us needs to hear anything of what they are saying. But they thought they could control the beast.

I wish it had succeeded. There’s no way, around here, someone like me was ever going to be able to get through to people the way a show like that would. And there’s no way you could produce a similar sounding show without having it’s history. It would have been cancelled before you could build up the audience. If the actress were dead, maybe they could have done an after-Roseanne, but not now.

Granted, it’s on a premium network (Showtime) and is an adaptation of a British show, but Shameless did a pretty good job of addressing a lot of the same issues in a clearly working class white family on the south side of Chicago. That said, it might be a bad example because it would not have worked on basic cable let alone network.

I think my point is more that, they didn’t need to use these particular characters to tell the stories they wanted to.