Into the depths of "Roseanne Gets the Chair" — Episode 3 of the "Roseanne" reboot.

It's seems like candy, a sitcom. You consume it, and it's gone. It's hard to even remember enough to talk about it. Maybe you can quote (or only paraphrase) a couple of lines — that's why we put marshmallows on yams? — and purport to know the "lesson" taught — parents need to set boundaries for their kids? — and retain a question to puzzle over — did Roseanne commit criminal child abuse on her granddaughter? 

But did you really see what happened?

I watched the show last night, and even had a conversation about it afterwards, but I didn't feel capable of writing about it without watching it again. So that's what I did, first thing this morning, when I got up at 5. I rewatched. And I did a lot of rewinding and thinking. I took notes — 5 pages of notes.

So what I'm going to do now is, essentially, "live-blog" my reading of my notes. That is, I'm going to post updates as I go. I plan to go really deep, which is why I'm using the the live-blog format, which I know seems (paradoxically) shallow. It will help me not get impatient with the length of what I want to say and to discover things that I'm sure are lying just beneath the surface, waiting to emerge. It is not candy. It is a Thanksgiving feast, with all the yams and marshmallows.


The action takes place entirely inside the Conner's house. We see Roseanne traveling a path within her own house, beginning and ending in the upstairs bathroom. It is a path from dirty to clean. We begin with Roseanne — the only person awake— experiencing the filth of her own house. Towels on the floor, dishes in the hallway, left outside the door like it's "the Mariott." In the end, she will enter the shower naked — ousting her clean-enough granddaughter. She will travel through the door marked "Not an Exit" to the bedroom of her daughter Darlene. She'll be downstairs next, in from her work as an Uber driver. Her husband will attempt to her lure upstairs, not for sex, but to try out the "Easy-Climb 5000" he's installed on their staircase. But she doesn't want the easy way up. She refuses to ascend. In that downstairs space — living room, kitchen, laundry room — the action unwinds and a climax is reached. And then it becomes possible to go upstairs. Once again, Roseanne goes through the "Not an Exit" door. And, finally, she gets her place in the shower.

In the first sequence, Roseanne is troubled by needed to clean up after everyone, but she's doing it. She takes out her irritation on Darlene, who's sleeping, who know how late? Darlene, who's moved back home for money reasons, is sleeping in what is not (I assume) her childhood bedroom but her brother's old room. The wallpaper has little tractors and trucks on it, and there's a red batter's helmit on the shelf above the bed. There's a Kiss poster on the wall. The bedsheets, though, are girly — flower-patterned, like one of Roseanne's sweaters. Roseanne wakes up Darlene to complain about the "slobs" in the house and tells Darlene, the mother, to step up to role of disciplinarian. Roseanne wants  the role of "fun grandma."

Darlene attributes the mess to her daughter Harris's new business — using Etsy to sell used clothing — even though the mess we've seen so far is dirty towels and dishes. Darlene is down and flat, explaining economic reality, as if that trumps the ordinary household matters that concern Roseanne. Darlene does PR for Harris: it's "cool" to present the clothing of the poor through Etsy. Roseanne says the word "fun" again: "Yeah, it’s all fun and games until you’re reusing your diabetes needles." She's been limping around, looking unhealthy, but she is the one who's awake early and working, while Darlene is sleeping and barely able to talk without her coffee.

In the next scene, we see Roseanne entering the house through the kitchen, greeted by her husband as his "Uber gal." Dan makes a prostitution joke: "How was your day picking up strangers for money?" That raises the idea of lawlessness, adding resonance to Roseanne's complaint that one guy wanted her to "stop at every single stop sign." Roseanne and Dan take following the government's law rather lightly (even though following the rules within the jurisdiction of the Conner house matters a lot to them). All that stopping "killed" her bad knee. She looks for her ice pack, and Dan says — continuing his sexual innuendo — "I've got something way better to show you."

Dan beckons her out of the kitchen, but they travel only to the living room, to the foot of the stairs, where what's supposed to "overjoy" her is the contraption that gives you a ride up the stairs, the "Easy-Climb 5000." Roseanne doesn't want to use it. It's for "old people" she says first, then switches to the economic argument: They can't afford it. But Dan "got it for the very reasonable price of our neighbor died and they're tearing down his house." That is, he stripped it from a vacant house. Lawlessness again. Did he just steal it? Roseanne asked. No, he also stole the copper pipes.

Harris bursts on the scene, running downstairs — she's young! — and revealing that she left the ice pack up there after using it to keep a smoothie cold. Harris, with her mother Darlene, have moved back to Roseanne's house after living in Chicago, and Harris, despite her economic need, sees herself as from a higher class. She drinks smoothies, makes money on Etsy, and feels entitled to live somewhere else. But she lives here, and these are her people. She breezes through the room and right out the front door, causing Dan to say sarcastically, "We're so lucky she lets us live here," which is one of many jokes about the ownership of the house (and who really has jurisdiction over it).

The ice pack — coldness, not love — is what Roseanne needs but it's upstairs. How can she get what she needs when she needs what she needs to get what she needs? Dan — representing warm love — gestures comically, maniacally at the mechanical device. We don't know about Dan's genitalia, but the Easy-Climb is an externalization of his physical love for her. But she doesn't want to use that, because for her, it symbolizes not his love, but her weakness. She rejects it/him, and declares she doesn't need it, she's "young and vibrant."

There follows a sequence in which my DVR malfunctions, but it seems to be a race between the Easy-Climb and Roseanne walking feebly up the stairs, with Dan narrating like the sports announcer for a horse race. I think the audience experiences this as very funny, and I wonder if there was an alternative script in which, as Roseanne plods away, we see some trace of sadness in Dan, that his effort to reach her has fallen short. But Dan's manhood is a buried subtext. The show is "Roseanne."

Next, we're in the kitchen, and Roseanne is complaining to Darlene about Harris's excessive use of the laundry machines. The laundry is just outside the kitchen door, and you can see into it through the window over the kitchen sink, which is made of those glass louvres I think they call "jalousies." These allow us to see characters approaching the kitchen door, and Becky (Roseanne's other daughter) is seen tearing toward the Roseanne-Darlene confrontation. Darlene is saying she'll talk to Harris when she gets out of the shower, and Becky ups the confrontation: You're going to wait for your kid to get out of the shower? Mom used to yell at us when we were in the shower. Becky then does an imitation of the shower scene in "Psycho" — screetching and making a stabbing motion — at Roseanne. Roseanne quips, "Well, at least Norman Bates respected his mother."

I've been reading comments as I go along, and one thing I just learned is that the book "American Psycho" ends with the words "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT." The words are on a sign over a door, and that was, as I noted above, is the sign on Becky's door. Now, there is direct discussion of the Hitchcock "Psycho," so it's virtually certain that the sign on Becky's door was an intentional invocation of the "Psycho"-influenced book/movie "American Psycho." Speaking of lawlessness, we're not talking about murder. Murder in the shower. The water is flowing — in the laundry and the shower — and the blood is flowing — figuratively, in the form of anger — and there's an insinuation that real blood may flow. I mean, it can't, really, because this is a sitcom. But there is a dark undercurrent, and it is a current of blood.

But Becky's not the real focus here. She's had her bit, and she's gone. It's Darlene who matters. She's going to move the laundry, the cleanness mess Harris made that Harris can't deal with because she's getting clean in the shower, and Dan wonders when Darlene became "such a pushover" — Darlene, whom they once actually "feared a little bit." Darlene reacts feistily and Roseanne pushes her toward the stairs and tells her to "aim it at your kid." When Darlene tells Roseanne to cut Harris some "slack," Roseanne says — and this is the ostensible lesson of the whole episode — "Kids don't need slack. They need boundaries." That very normal wisdom is then bumped up with the tinge of psychotic criminality: "The happiest kids are raised in cages. And it keeps the meat tender."

The audience laughs. Because it's a sitcom. And if that's not enough to lift you from the darkness, a commercial for Febreeze is next, with a supertidy black woman sniffing with dainty disgust and spraying the product in what looks like the cleanest house in the world. The voiceover says: "No matter how much you clean, does your house still smell stuffy?" That's the most perfectly placed ad I have every seen. There's no aerosol spray that can eliminate your urge to murder your children and eat them, except yes, there is. The urge is only in your head, and if you truly believe that Febreeze works on whatever's the stuff that's stuffing your head, it does work.

And the commercial break doubles down on blackness with a promo for the sitcom "Black-ish." We see an upper-middle class black family with the son announcing that he got into Stanford. The mother shows surprise, then censors herself to a mawkish, insincere "Of course, you did sweetie." This is an important — and, I assume, intentional — set-up for a joke that comes up in "Roseanne."

We're returned to the Conner's kitchen, where there is even more cleaning going on. Darlene is scrubbing a zucchini with a vegetable brush, an item Roseanne treats as unfamiliar and ridiculous. Dan seems unfamiliar with zucchini and asks if she could scrub it enough to turn it into a french fry. Harris — or as I call her "Debbie" (the actress is Debbie from "Shameless") — breezes in to say she's going to the mall and Darlene lamely jabbers about meeting Harris's friends and ends up giving her $5 to spend. Harris calls her mother "Darlene," which Aunt Jackie (played by the brilliantly mugging actress Laurie Metcalf) defends as "very modern" and: "It allows the parent and the child to address each other as equals." But when Harris responds, "Thanks, Jackie," Jackie insists on "Aunt Jackie," because it's "the only title that I have." Some people feel entitled (Harris) and some care staunchly about their title to their property (Roseanne), but all Jackie has is the modest honorific, "Aunt."

Harris displays her attitude of social superiority grandly in this scene. She was dragged out of Chicago to this "hick town" where people drink beer behind the Dairy Queen, but she snaps up the $5 with a little-girl "thanks." She leaves, and Dan and Roseanne tells Darlene she did everything wrong. You can't trust your kids, Roseanne says, "because they're stupid." Darlene opines that Roseanne's parenting didn't always work and "some of it was against the law." There's that lawlessness again. And Roseanne defends it: "Yeah, it's against the law because your generation made everything so PC." When you send kids to their room to think, Roseanne says, what they think is "I can't believe this loser isn't spanking me." Dan reminisces about his father hitting him with a broom. And Jackie reminisces about Dairy Queen: She dated a boy who worked at Dairy Queen and gave her free Dilly Bars... pause... "I guess they weren't totally free." There's that coldness for love again. Laurie Metcalf's line reading is so good that it's very funny and simultaneously horrifying. She gave sex for ice cream and we get the queasy feeling that the sex was rape and the Dilly Bars were an after-the-fact appeasement, along the lines of put some ice on it.

We see Dan and Roseanne piled on top of each other sleeping on the living room couch. They've slept "from 'Wheel' to Kimmel" — it's 11. Dan says, "We've missed all the shows about black and Asian families," and Roseanne says, "They're just like us." Here's where the "Black-ish" set up mattered. Roseanne isn't pushing Dan into some PC place. She's being sarcastic: The Conners are poor, and the black and Asian families on the shows are much better off economically.

Roseanne rouses herself to get up and go do laundry, after Harris monopolized the machines all day washing "hobo clothes" (for selling on Etsy, which Roseanne calls "the Betsy"). Dan talks about how Darlene doesn't want to be the "bad cop" and doesn't have the advantage of a 2-parent family where the parents can do a "good cop/bad cop" routine. It doesn't work to just have "good cop," because "the movie nobody ever, ever wants to see" is "Clint Eastwood as 'Supportive Harry.'"

But then Dan won't get up and help Roseanne with the laundry or even just keep her company. He stretches out to go back to sleep. She asks, "Where'd all the real men go?" And he answers, "They're hiding from all the real women." And there's Roseanne again, as she was in the beginning of the episode, the only one awake in the house and facing housework. She travels to the laundry room, then does a sudden reversal: "Damn!" Let it be noted that hanging on the wall behind her is a Make America Great Again hat.

Roseanne is mad and ready to ascend the stairs and, at last, to use the "Easy-Climb" — a machine of her own. "It's on!" She's yelling. All must wake up. Dan wakes, but pretends to sleep. She's going up after Harris. It's The Uprising.

After the commercial break, Roseanne is ascending in the chair. A kind of throne. Roseanne "Gets the Chair" is the name of the episode.  It makes a buzzing sound — perhaps like a vibrator (finally getting satisfaction from Dan?) — and that makes Dan jump up. He gets out his cheap old phone to get a photo — amateur-pornishly. The hubbub unleashes Harris, who comes running down the stairs as Roseanne is rising slowly, now in the wrong direction. Roseanne reverses and eventually makes it to the kitchen, where Roseanne's erstwhile weakness also reverses.

Roseanne asserts her dominance over Harris. First, by taking away the muffin she's eating and returning it to the plastic grocery-store container. Roseanne makes the rules and the muffins are for breakfast. Second, Roseanne tells her off. Harris is acting as though she owns the place and "we don't even own the place." Roseanne wants control of all of her territory: the dryer, the muffins, the house. She has title. She's entitled. She's proud and has self-respect, even though she's utterly aware that she's poor. She takes Harris down. She's not "better than everybody else," and "You're smart for a kid, but you're still dumb for a person," and "start showing some gratitude instead of acting like an entitled little bitch."

Harris's response: "I don't need to get yelled at by some stupid old hillbilly."

Here's the child abuse part. Roseanne tricks Harris by telling her to rinse off the muffin plate and, when she obliges, jumping on her back, jamming her head down in the sink, and grabbing the spray faucet and dousing her, yelling "Welcome to The Hillbilly Day Spa!" This is not interrupted by the big strong granddaughter shaking off the feeble grandmother. Either Roseanne's psychological dominance works or we're supposed to believe for just this one scene that Roseanne is physically strong, that Roseanne's anger infuses her with new powers, or that there is a childlike part of Harris who longs for limits and the steadying hand of authority. This washing clean of the sin of rebellion is interrupted by Darlene, who stops the hillbilly waterboarding and requires Harris to apologize and to get her clothes out of the laundry.

This denouement is interrupted by a second climax: Harris drops a sweater that has a security tag on it, revealing that Harris has been going to the mall to steal clothes (or receive stolen goods) for her Etsy scheme. More lawlessness.

Darlene brings up the outside-of-the-house authority: You could go to jail for going on line and selling stolen things. "Are you stupid?" Roseanne yells through the jalousies: "Yes." Harris says she just wanted to make money "because my life sucks." Roseanne yells through the jalousies across a windowsill loaded with prescription drug bottles and assorted crap (including a troll doll) — "Hey, all our lives suck. That's why we put marshmallows on yams."

Darlene gets time to be the bad cop with her daughter. Darlene spouts: Harris betrayed her. She trusted Harris, because she felt guilty about bringing her into the grandparents' domain. Harris tells her mother that she should feel guilty. She doesn't belong here. And she's trying to make money to go live in Chicago with a friend's sister. Darlene is shocked: "Part of me wants to ask how big Anna's sister's apartment is, but let's go to a healthier place here." Darlene is so distracted by her own poverty and disappointment, as if she has no foundation for asserting control over her child, who's energized to migrate for better economic conditions. The "healthier" idea she comes up with is: "Are you really that unhappy?" And Harris not only says yes, but "If you make me stay, I'm going to hate you."

Darlene rises to the challenge of parenthood: "Then that's how it's going to be." But "we're in this together" and "No matter what you think of those crazy old stupid hillbillies, they will get in a pickup truck and they will pull you out of any well that you fall into." They may dunk you in the sink, but that's a shallower water place than a well, and they'll pull you out of a well. Darlene renders judgment: 3 weeks of grounding, end the Etsy, and give me all your passwords.

Next scene, back where we began: Roseanne goes through the "This is not an exit" door. Roseanne sits on the bed next to Darlene, and just behind Roseanne's head, under sharp lighting from a lamp, is that red batter's helmet, and I feel sure it's meant to echo the Make America Great Again Hat in the laundry room. Lessons are summed up. You can't just trust people. "Kids lie, people cheat, and you don't want to be eaten by the bear," says Dan (in what I don't think is a deliberate allusion to Russian interference in the last election).  And it's hard to be a parent, but Darlene stepped up.

Darlene and Roseanne dive into using Harris's passwords to check out her social media. Dan somberly begins: "Rose, it's okay for a mom to check up on her, but we're just snooping." Then, he flaps his arms girlishly and chirps, "Move over, girls!"

We return after a commercial break to see naked-from-the-shoulders-up Harris, taking a shower. It's the shower scene, after those "Psycho" references. Harris recites all the good things she's done — washing dishes, etc. — but Roseanne punches at the shower curtain, in a rhythm that's like Becky's imitation of Norman Bates. Roseanne bursts into the shower, not to murder Harris, but to get in there naked with her. Harris runs out, and naked Roseanne, washing one armpit, says, "Oh, what? You're too good to shower with your grandma?!"

Order is restored. The grandma gets to be fun, and the mother has grounded herself in authority. After that dirty bathroom that began the show, there's been so much washing — all that laundry, the dunking in the sink, and finally the teenager and the grandmother's shower. The grandmother exults.

Nobody wants to see Clint Eastwood as "Supportive Harry," but we don't need "Dirty Roseanne." We want to see her prevail over all — all being everything inside that house. Everything is clean, and she can be Supportive Roseanne, because the mother has risked the threatened hate of her daughter to be the bad cop — to be Dirty Darlene.

"Roseanne Gets the Chair"= the old woman deserves her seat, and it's time for the next generation to do the hardest work.