Gone to America

Something happened yesterday. Something I’d been waiting patiently for for nine years. It came without warning. I had no time to prepare. But I coped all right, thank God.

I always kind-of-liked the show Roseanne, created by Roseanne Barr (later Roseanne Arnold, then just Roseanne). It could generally make me laugh, and it was pretty edgy at times for a sitcom. I never like Roseanne herself much, but she had surrounded herself with a load of incredibly talented actors: John Goodman, Laurie Metcalfe and Estelle Parsons. Those guys were always good value – they could wring laughs out of anything. A lot of the time it seemed like even Roseanne herself was enjoying just sitting back and watching them do their things. I also had a bit of a thing for Sara Gilbert at one point – not the last lesbian I’ve unwittingly been attracted to.

Of course, the show went off the rails, as all long running sitcoms seem to do. It jumped the shark, in the parlance of our day or (or de nos jours). The last season was in 1997. In 1997 I was in my last year of film school, making my first (and last) short film, editing shorts for three of my classmates (and myself) and working on my thesis (well, some of the time). After I finished all of that I spent a while looking for work before ending up on the Screen Training Ireland sound editing course that really defined my career up until the present day. I spent the last two months of 1997 in Sony Studios in LA as a sound intern. It was great, but I didn’t watch a lot of TV that year. I missed the last episode of Roseanne.

Anyway, it was pretty bad at that point. Roseanne won the lottery, everyone was pregnant, everyone was gay… It was just a mess. Entirely desperate. But even when sitcoms you’ve liked go bad it’s still nice to see how they finish up. Will the bar finally close? Will the Korean war end? Will Carlton get into Princeton? Will Theo’s family get to watch him graduate? Will Jill and Tim..? You get the idea. I couldn’t imagine what Roseanne would do after seemingly using up all the plot anyone could come up with. One thing was for sure – the entire cast would gather on the stage and cry while the audience goes nuts.

Well, not this time as it turns out. It was actually pretty interesting. I’d read somewhere over the years that the last episode was really strange and awful, like Seinfeld, but in fact I found it to be very smart. As I’ve said, the show went completely insane in the last season. The final episode seems to acknowledge this, and tries to remedy it. One could almost believe after watching it that the entire ridiculous, over the top final year was deliberately so and not simply the result of a series of terrible misjudgements.

Roseanne in voiceover recasts the entire season, and indeed the entire run of the show, as the product of her writing – we have been watching the fictional Roseanne’s fictionalisation of her real fictional life. The desperate fantasy of the final season is explained as her way of dealing with her sadness at the fictional Dan’s fictional real death – fictional fictional Dan survived a heart attack sometime in the previous season, which fictional real Dan apparently didn’t.

Nice. Particularly as the show was created by Roseanne to be a fictionalised version of her real life before she became famous. I don’t think I’ve seen such a daring after-the-fact rewrite since David Lynch shot an extra 45 minutes of footage for Mulholland Drive to turn a TV pilot into a self contained feature by providing the real life that the pilot is the dream of – I think. Of course, this episode preceded that movie by about four years.

I don’t want you to think that I’ve been obsessing over this for the past nine years, but it was added to the list of things that I didn’t have closure on – an obscured, tangential list, whose contents are mysterious and ever changing. It is not tabulated, the items on it occasionally drifting in and out of my mind like the answers that appear when you shake the magic eight ball, floating up at random from the murky depths, except that these are questions.

A frightening number of these questions are TV related. In fact, I think that’s its own list entirely. These are things that I don’t feel strongly enough about to actually seek out – I never would have paid for a DVD with this episode on it – but still watch for. I have enough experience of and faith in the tendency of TV to repeat everything sooner or later and probably often that I’m content to just wait for them to drift in front of me. There’s no rush.

But this was nine years! I’m not sure but I believe that this is the longest I’ve ever had to wait. I waited about two years to see the episode of the West Wing where President Bartlett got shot (and I’m now waiting for the last episode of that show to come around again – I missed it), and I was waiting quite a while for the last episode of MASH, but this was special, because it was so intriguing.

So – yesterday. I was on my sofa in front of the TV, idly surfing. I was aware that the Oxygen network had been showing a lot of Roseanne – kind of a marathon – but there were a lot of episodes… Wait! Could it be..? Yes. Yes! Finally! Just in time. I saw the whole thing from opening bit to closing credit. No waving at the audience! The item “watch last episode of Roseanne” drifted into the little aperture of my awareness, was ticked off, and vanished forever. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank TV for being so repetitive. Actually, it’s being shown again right now.

But once was enough.

Otherwise, things are good, even apart from unfinshed sitcom business. My job at the moment consists entirely of playing eagerly awaited video games from beginning to end and making notes. I finished this one a couple of days ago, and now I’m working my way through this. Yes, I do get paid. I’m about to be free of debt. I’m thinking about moving to a bigger apartment, although I haven’t decided yet – I’ve been hanging out in Brooklyn a lot lately, and it’s really become appealing to me. I think I’m over Harlem. I’m near a lot of cool stuff, but I’ve walked past too many drug deals.

Other things are good too. I recently saw a cut of the movie made from the screenplay I rewrote back in ’04. It contains my second filmed decapitation, using the same fake head as the first one. The head lives on my desk now, acting as a hat stand and creeper-out of people in the office. The movie looks good – it’s been so long since I worked on it that I can’t even remember which bits I’m responsible for. Ted Raimi in it, which is cool.

My parents just had their wedding anniversary. I’m not sure which one, although I should of course know this. Happy anniversary! They’ve moved out of the house, and are living in temporary accomodation until the new one is habitable. Eleanor’s baby is due shortly – about a week, I believe. Uncledom ho. And I got a new phone. I think that’s all for now, although it’s very possible I’ve forgotten something. Too bad if so.

Oh, wait! I contributed a couple of tips and photographs to Kotaku about the giant PSP on Houston being taken down and put up again. I didn’t tell them who I work for. On which topic, we got protested again – here’s a video from YouTube somebody took. Almost everything this guy says is entirely inaccurate, which is kind of depressing. Nobody like being accused of terrorism.

I love YouTube.

EDIT:
News Flash! It seems that Lecy Goranson who used to play Becky in Roseanne now calls herself “Alicia” and has a blog and lives in Brooklyn where I’m thinking of moving! If I had realised this earlier I would probably have been able to tie this all together somehow. Although she wasn’t actually in the last episode – Sarah Chalke had taken over the role at that point.