Jump to content

Type keyword(s) to search

Conner Canon and Continuity


Recommended Posts

On 3/28/2018 at 11:59 AM, peacheslatour said:

60% of restaurants fail in the first year. 80% in the first five. Location is generally the reason. -From CNBC.

Yeah, true, but I wish they had kept it in because the Lunch Box gave a really good reason for having non-family members pop up. But it is realistic.

So Andy might have been retconned (maybe Jackie is a lesbian like the book said?) but Jerry definitely exists and is an adult like he should be.

Mark is dead, but Becky doesn't seem to have a kid. Also, she's now a pretend Millennial. Okay.

  • Love 3
On 3/28/2018 at 11:20 AM, BitterApple said:

I could too. My sister divorced when my nephew was seven, and shared joint custody with her ex. Now that my nephew is early 20s, he works for his dad's business and recently moved in with him. Andy gravitating towards Fred would make perfect sense for a young man his age.

Regarding Mark, I'm glad they didn't recast. I can't imagine anyone but Glenn Quinn in that role.

Harris being a high school freshman is driving me batty. 

This!!  I get that aging a character down would bring more storylines for the character, but viewers can't ignore this.

  • Love 2
32 minutes ago, PRgal said:

This!!  I get that aging a character down would bring more storylines for the character, but viewers can't ignore this.

 

29 minutes ago, peacheslatour said:

They do it all the time on soap operas. *shrug*

Ayap! It's called SORASING/DESORASING (when it's aging down) Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome.

  • Love 4

When I watched soaps, it was the opposite -- SORAS (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome), where a character was born one year, was a kid just a couple of years after that, a teenager in another few years, and then suddenly an adult running their parents' company.

Since they're playing a bit fast and loose with what was real and what was the book, maybe Harris wasn't really born when we thought she was, maybe she didn't come along until later -- when Roseanne wrote the book, she wrote Darlene and David having a baby when they were really young (although why on earth you'd do that in a book that is supposed to be fixing what was bad about real life, I do not know), and named it Harris, and then later when they did have a kid, Darlene thought that was a really cool name and used it.

Because if season nine didn't happen, then Harris wasn't born, at least not then. 

I'm sure they just want us to ignore the discrepancy and go with it because having a mini-Darlene teenager in the mix is one of the best things about this revival, and I will.  And I don't think they want to touch the book thing ever again - they dispensed with it in the first episode to explain Dan's existence, and just want to move on.  But if I really felt compelled to make sense of Harris's age, the book would give me a way.

  • Love 7

I am hoping that Harris's premature birth remains canon, even if they are playing with her age. The actors did some amazing work with those scenes. And I'd like to get a scene or two of Darlene ripping Becky over the health issues she's potentially setting this baby up for in the surrogacy scenario. Darlene knows what it's like to sit by an incubator day after day, watching every struggling breath and every tick of vital signs. To not know day to day if your baby is going to survive. To not know and yet worry endlessly about long term health issues and quality of life. If Harris was really born as prematurely as depicted, she was in the hospital for *months* and it's a freaking miracle if she doesn't have lingering health issues (she doesn't appear to so far). 

  • Love 4
4 minutes ago, Bastet said:

When I watched soaps, it was the opposite -- SORAS (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome), where a character was born one year, was a kid just a couple of years after that, a teenager in another few years, and then suddenly an adult running their parents' company.

That still happens. But apparently in the past decade or so, they've done the opposite--making someone younger than they should be. It happened on One Life to Live, I believe. And it's happened on General Hospital. Just because the actress who plays one character's mom still looks like she's in her early twenties, they've refused to age up her son because she doesn't look "old enough" to have a teenager. And so he's been stuck being seven for the past five years.

  • Love 4

I just realized Becky has personally retconned her birthyear from 1974-1975 to 1984-1985.

As someone who is 32 (and very close to Becky's pretend age), it makes me giggle to think we'd be pretend age peers when she's actually older than my '77-born eldest sister. She should do a board with a fake history like Liza did on Younger so she won't slip up and mention having a crush on Marky Mark or something else that wouldn't jibe with someone born in the mid-1980's. I feel like I want to sit Becky down and school her on the art of being someone who was born in 1985. I'd be like, "Just remember, your first crush was Jonathan Taylor Thomas and you have absolutely no clue on how to use a rotary phone or a typewriter." Stuff like that.

7 hours ago, GHScorpiosRule said:

That still happens. But apparently in the past decade or so, they've done the opposite--making someone younger than they should be. It happened on One Life to Live, I believe. And it's happened on General Hospital. Just because the actress who plays one character's mom still looks like she's in her early twenties, they've refused to age up her son because she doesn't look "old enough" to have a teenager. And so he's been stuck being seven for the past five years.

Sometimes they have people just "freeze". Abigail on Days was SORASED to a teen in high school/college in 2004, and she basically stayed there for almost a decade until her age more or less caught up to what it should have been.

I feel like it wouldn't bug as much if they had kept Jerry a kid too, but he's obviously his real age so it feels off.

  • Love 3
9 hours ago, methodwriter85 said:

She should do a board with a fake history like Liza did on Younger so she won't slip up and mention having a crush on Marky Mark or something else that wouldn't jibe with someone born in the mid-1980's.

I was born in '83 and my 5 year old self had a massive crush on Jordan Knight from NKOTB and I thought Marky Mark was so cool. Plus, my grandmother had a rotary phone when I was little and my dad still owned a typewriter. All she has to do is say she was little when she was exposed to all these things (rather than actually growing up with them) and she'll be fine.  :)

  • Love 2
18 hours ago, GHScorpiosRule said:

That still happens. But apparently in the past decade or so, they've done the opposite--making someone younger than they should be. It happened on One Life to Live, I believe. 

I was a OLTL fan, but I don't remember it ever happening on that show (although now I'm wondering if it happened a bit to Sarah Roberts--yikes, that's a mind bender I didn't need today! lol) .

It DID happen to Mike Horton on DAYS, though--another soap with the word "Life/Lives" in the title. 

18 hours ago, GHScorpiosRule said:

 And it's happened on General Hospital. Just because the actress who plays one character's mom still looks like she's in her early twenties, they've refused to age up her son because she doesn't look "old enough" to have a teenager. And so he's been stuck being seven for the past five years.

Never mind the fact that Becky Herbst has TWO teenagers in real life now. Sigh.

(And even though she doesn't look like she's about to turn 41 in May, I'd say she looks more like late 20s/early 30s now.)

Edited by UYI
  • Love 2
14 minutes ago, UYI said:

I was a OLTL fan, but I don't remember it ever happening on that show

I thought I read how one character who was supposed to be the younger sibling, ended up being older? Or something like that? Granted, I'd stopped watching One Life to Live years ago, and this was a discussion on the General Hospital Thread. My main point was that traditional SORASING still happens, but it also happens int he reverse as well.

23 hours ago, methodwriter85 said:

I just realized Becky has personally retconned her birthyear from 1974-1975 to 1984-1985.

As someone who is 32 (and very close to Becky's pretend age), it makes me giggle to think we'd be pretend age peers when she's actually older than my '77-born eldest sister. She should do a board with a fake history like Liza did on Younger so she won't slip up and mention having a crush on Marky Mark or something else that wouldn't jibe with someone born in the mid-1980's. I feel like I want to sit Becky down and school her on the art of being someone who was born in 1985. I'd be like, "Just remember, your first crush was Jonathan Taylor Thomas and you have absolutely no clue on how to use a rotary phone or a typewriter." Stuff like that.

Sometimes they have people just "freeze". Abigail on Days was SORASED to a teen in high school/college in 2004, and she basically stayed there for almost a decade until her age more or less caught up to what it should have been.

I feel like it wouldn't bug as much if they had kept Jerry a kid too, but he's obviously his real age so it feels off.

Oh child, to us 70s-born children, Marky Mark is Donny Wahlberg's younger brother.  We were screaming for Donny and Jordan (well not I, personally, but friends I knew) in junior high and listening to Nirvana in high school.  So Becky would screw up if she talked about how much she loved Donny back in the day.

  • Love 5

The word "Flagler" appears a few times over the years. It is written on the men's room stall when Roseanne is dressed as a man for Halloween. Then it was Stacy's last name ....who worked at the Lunch Box. When they are at Becky's  trailer, Dan says the antique hubcap was from a 1954 Flagler. Lastly, Jackie had a t-shirt with it written when they showed up at the fancy spa. I wonder if the word is supposed to be connected to maybe a cast member or was nothing at all?

Edited by Sherilea43
  • Love 3
On 3/29/2018 at 2:01 PM, Bastet said:

Because if season nine didn't happen, then Harris wasn't born, at least not then.

I think that mentioning the book has allowed them to pick and choose what was "real" from the entire run of the show, not just toward the end, and not just the things she specifically said she changed, since saying she changed X, Y, and Z is part of the book itself, and revealing that she's an unreliable narrator.  I mean, I don't think that they're going to change too much stuff, because that would be too confusing for the viewers, but it seems to me they can without jeopardizing continuity.

 

On 3/30/2018 at 7:14 AM, AgentRXS said:

I was born in '83 and my 5 year old self had a massive crush on Jordan Knight from NKOTB and I thought Marky Mark was so cool. Plus, my grandmother had a rotary phone when I was little and my dad still owned a typewriter. All she has to do is say she was little when she was exposed to all these things (rather than actually growing up with them) and she'll be fine.  :)

I was going to say, I was born in '83 also, and I learned to dial on a rotary phone, I learned to type on a typewriter (we later upgraded to an electric typewriter - fancy! - before getting a computer when I was in late high school), and I kept a magazine with a picture of Marky Mark in my desk at school so that I could gaze upon him at recess.  Pop culture stuff is different, but I can see the Conners keeping old technology around relatively longer due to frugality, much like my family.

  • Love 3
5 hours ago, janie jones said:

I was going to say, I was born in '83 also, and I learned to dial on a rotary phone, I learned to type on a typewriter (we later upgraded to an electric typewriter - fancy! - before getting a computer when I was in late high school), and I kept a magazine with a picture of Marky Mark in my desk at school so that I could gaze upon him at recess.  Pop culture stuff is different, but I can see the Conners keeping old technology around relatively longer due to frugality, much like my family.

Yep, I was born in ‘84 and we had a rotary phone when I first learned how to use the phone. My first few formal papers for high school were typed up on my grandfather’s electric typewriter because we didn’t get a computer until I was already halfway through 9th grade. So yeah, old technology can definitely be linked to frugality. It was in my life growing up! 

  • Love 3
(edited)

Wow. My family got our first computer in 1993 and we came from a pretty poor background. And I took it for granted that any American who was in elementary or middle school in the 90's. would have learned typing on the computer program Mavis Beacon in their school computer lab. I went to a pretty poor elementary school in the late 90's and even they had a computer lab with ancient Macs from the late 80's, but still a computer lab. The first internet access I had seen was circa 1996, during a time where I attended a better-funded elementary school and our computer lab had internet access. But I don't ever remember attending an elementary school that didn't have computers, and I went to a lot of different ones starting in 1991.

Anyway, the Marky Mark joke was in reference to Dan and Roseanne mentioning that Becky got a tattoo of him.

Maybe a better dated reference would be Kirk Cameron? Really, only Becky's age group seems to have had a thing for that guy, before he turned into a crazy nutwing. There was even a joke about it on Saved by the Bell's wedding episode, where Lisa and Kelly bust out a photo of Kirk Cameron to remember their first love before Kelly gets married to Zach.

The actual show though seemed like they really avoided making references to current music or teen idols. They were relatively up-to-date with fashion, but they didn't mention much of what was going on in music or such. Becky and Darlene did want to go to a U2 concert, but that seems to be about it when it comes to Gen Xer references other than the clothing styles they put Becky and Darlene in. I wondered if that was because they wanted to be blurry about the time period Roseanne was taking place in?

They did have Roseanne and Jackie reference things from their childhood and young adulthood- Frampton, Chablis, the Hanky Panky song, the Seasons in the Sun song, and various t.v. shows from the 60's.

It would be kind of cool if the reboot would do the same thing for Darlene and Becky. Maybe someone can sing "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany or something.

Edited by methodwriter85
  • Love 1
1 hour ago, methodwriter85 said:

Wow. My family got our first computer in 1993 and we came from a pretty poor background. And I took it for granted that any American who was in elementary or middle school in the 90's. would have learned typing on the computer program Mavis Beacon in their school computer lab. I went to a pretty poor elementary school in the late 90's and even they had a computer lab with ancient Macs from the late 80's, but still a computer lab. The first internet access I had seen was circa 1996, during a time where I attended a better-funded elementary school and our computer lab had internet access. But I don't ever remember attending an elementary school that didn't have computers, and I went to a lot of different ones starting in 1991.

Anyway, the Marky Mark joke was in reference to Dan and Roseanne mentioning that Becky got a tattoo of him.

Maybe a better dated reference would be Kirk Cameron? Really, only Becky's age group seems to have had a thing for that guy, before he turned into a crazy nutwing. There was even a joke about it on Saved by the Bell's wedding episode, where Lisa and Kelly bust out a photo of Kirk Cameron to remember their first love before Kelly gets married to Zach.

Yeah, I went to an inner city school in poor neighborhood and although we didn't have computers as far back as elementary school, we did start using the ancient Apple computers back middle school (95-97) in computer lab.

My dad got his first personal computer in '95 (because my stepmom is a computer programmer). However, my mom was beyond poor and to this day has never owned a computer. Different strokes for different folks.

I remember Kirk Cameron being a heartthrob for the older generation....I remember teenage children of my mom's friends being crazy about him.

  • Love 1
16 hours ago, methodwriter85 said:

But I don't ever remember attending an elementary school that didn't have computers, and I went to a lot of different ones starting in 1991.

I think maybe my post wasn't clear.  My elementary school had a computer lab.  We didn't have a computer until I was in high school.  Just because things like computers may have existed and been accessible to Becky when she was growing up doesn't mean she wouldn't know how to use things like typewriters.

  • Love 1
(edited)
2 hours ago, janie jones said:

I think maybe my post wasn't clear.  My elementary school had a computer lab.  We didn't have a computer until I was in high school.  Just because things like computers may have existed and been accessible to Becky when she was growing up doesn't mean she wouldn't know how to use things like typewriters.

Yeah, this is where I was going with my earlier post too. We had computers in school for awhile (mostly for typing practice and playing Oregon Trail!) before we had one at home. It wasn’t even that we were struggling financially either.....my parents were/are just really, really slow to adopt new technology, especially if it’s expensive and their old stuff still works. Don’t even get me started on how long it took my siblings and I to convince them to move to smart phones (“what do you mean I can SEE my grandchild on the phone while I talk to her???”). There’s still a functional rotary phone in their basement. Nobody ever uses it anymore, but yeah, we could if we wanted too. 

Edited by SparklesBitch
Clarity
  • Love 4
49 minutes ago, SparklesBitch said:

Yeah, this is where I was going with my earlier post too. We had computers in school for awhile (mostly for typing practice and playing Oregon Trail!) before we had one at home. 

Same here. My family didn't get a computer in our home until 2000. Mostly because we couldn't afford such things when I was younger. If I wanted to poke around on the internet just for fun when I was a kid, there was a place in town where people could go to hang out and spend a certain amount of time on computers to look up whatever, and my dad would sometimes take my sister and me there. And I'd just spend my time looking up stuff on my favorite cartoons and such :p. 

I remember having a couple friends who had computers when I was younger, but they didn't really spend a whole lot of time on them. 

  • Love 3
(edited)

Right. Mostly I was just joking about how Becky should make up a fake timeline of her life, like Liza on Younger or when Jenna on 30 Rock tried to pretend she was 29. A part of her fake age was lying that she didn't know what a drive-in was. LOL.

Becky was a Menudo fan? Now that is hysterical.

Mark Junior looks like he's 10 so I guess that means that Mark Senior had to die somewhere before 2008 or thereabouts. It also looks like Becky never had a kid.

Edited by methodwriter85
  • Love 1
(edited)

Didn't the Connor house have more than one full bathroom? I could have sworn they did. Darlene and Becky had their own full bath, which might have also connected to DJ's room, and then another full back where Dan and Roseanne's room was. Although it's possible that the other bathroom was also being used and thus Roseanne basically forcing Harris out of the shower.

Edited by methodwriter85
  • Love 3
30 minutes ago, Zoe said:

I'm pretty sure there was a Jack and Jill bathroom between the two bedrooms. We usually only saw them go through the girls' room, but in the Fisher episode, Darlene walks in on Jackie through DJ's room.

Today's episode showed a shower stall bathroom outside of the bedrooms. Maybe it was an addition?

Yeah, that's how I figured the bathroom upstairs was set up like, with Dan and Roseanne having their own bathroom downstairs.

  • Love 1
(edited)

There's a bathroom downstairs accessible both via that little "hallway" off the living room/kitchen and the master bedroom, and a bathroom upstairs attached to Becky and Darlene's old room.  Those are the bathrooms we saw the inside of the first time around. 

There is also the bathroom Jackie was in, that we did not see, connected to D.J.'s room when Darlene walked in on her (thinking it was D.J.) during the Fisher's abuse two-parter.  Via reference, there is also a hall bathroom referred to in the episode about D.J. masturbating. 

Those last two one-off bathrooms seem concocted for their specific story lines - we don't really know what's actually upstairs; tonight's episode seems to make canon the upstairs hall bathroom scenario, but I only got a quick glimpse as I was feeding the cats at the time and glanced up. 

(A Jack and Jill set-up wouldn't make sense, given what we saw of the girls' bathroom, as the two upstairs bedrooms are on opposite sides of the hall.)

Edited by Bastet
  • Love 2
5 minutes ago, Bastet said:

There is also the bathroom Jackie was in, that we did not see, connected to D.J.'s room when Darlene walked in on her (thinking it was D.J.) during the Fisher's abuse two-parter.  Via reference, there is also a hall bathroom referred to in the episode about D.J. masturbating. 

Those last two one-off bathrooms seem concocted for their specific story lines - we don't really know what's actually upstairs; tonight's episode seems to make canon the upstairs hall bathroom scenario, but I only got a quick glimpse as I was feeding the cats at the time and glanced up. 

(A Jack and Jill set-up wouldn't make sense, given what we saw of the girls' bathroom, as the two upstairs bedrooms are on opposite sides of the hall.)

I remember both of those storylines, but it doesn't make sense that a three-bedroom house built in the 60s/70s would have more than two bathrooms. I think the most likely scenario is that there is a hall bathroom upstairs and a bathroom off the master downstairs that's also accessible from the hallway. The other two were made up, as you said, for their respective storylines and scene setups.

  • Love 2
(edited)
7 hours ago, Bastet said:

There's a bathroom downstairs accessible both via that little "hallway" off the living room/kitchen and the master bedroom, and a bathroom upstairs attached to Becky and Darlene's old room.  Those are the bathrooms we saw the inside of the first time around. 

There is also the bathroom Jackie was in, that we did not see, connected to D.J.'s room when Darlene walked in on her (thinking it was D.J.) during the Fisher's abuse two-parter.  Via reference, there is also a hall bathroom referred to in the episode about D.J. masturbating. 

Those last two one-off bathrooms seem concocted for their specific story lines - we don't really know what's actually upstairs; tonight's episode seems to make canon the upstairs hall bathroom scenario, but I only got a quick glimpse as I was feeding the cats at the time and glanced up. 

(A Jack and Jill set-up wouldn't make sense, given what we saw of the girls' bathroom, as the two upstairs bedrooms are on opposite sides of the hall.)

 

It's a mistake in the production design, blame Garvin Eddy.

There are two bathrooms.

The one downstairs off the hallway IS the "hall bathroom" Darlene references in the masturbation ep.

Upstairs is a Jack and Jill bathroom between the two bedrooms. In the Fisher episode everyone is referencing, Darlene says "I locked my door, but the little freak must have got in through the bathroom" at the beginning during the bath bead incident. This whole scene is just to premise the fact that the bedrooms are connected through the bathroom for the later scene when Darlene walks in on Jackie.

Keep in mind this is just a tv show and it's not a real house. Yes, upstairs doesn't really make perfect sense. In the first 2 seasons, DJs room is backwards with the entrance the left side and the bathroom on the right. Same with the garage in the first season. The entrance was on the left. Also the basement stairs were originally through a door in the kitchen. Later they were in the service porch.

Edited by Mmmfloorpie
  • Love 3
4 hours ago, Lily H said:

The bedroom Darlene was in seemed to have the wrong setup to me. Tonight, Roseanne entered from the right, from a very different-looking hallway. I remember the girls sharing a room where the hallway door was on the left and the door to their ensuite bathroom was opposite, on the right side of the room.

I think Darlene is staying in DJ’s old room and the kids are sharing the girls’ room. 

I’m surprised that we haven’t seen DJ since the pilot episode. I thought we would have seen more of him. 

  • Love 1
51 minutes ago, peacheslatour said:

Don't try to make sense of the floor plan to the Conner house. That way lies madness.

Agree! The jack-and-jill bath on the original series drove me crazy because I'd try to come up with a floor plan that made sense, but couldn't. I use to do the same with Golden Girls, trying to figure out how four bedrooms were supposed to be off a ten foot hallway that had the kitchen on the right side and the living area/lanai on the left. 

  • Love 2
14 minutes ago, BitterApple said:

Agree! The jack-and-jill bath on the original series drove me crazy because I'd try to come up with a floor plan that made sense, but couldn't. I use to do the same with Golden Girls, trying to figure out how four bedrooms were supposed to be off a ten foot hallway that had the kitchen on the right side and the living area/lanai on the left. 

You can look up the Golden Girls floor plan online. But you can only find the first floor of the Conner house because there is no way the second floor makes sense, especially when you look at the exterior.

  • Love 1
(edited)
On 3/29/2018 at 5:14 PM, GHScorpiosRule said:

That still happens. But apparently in the past decade or so, they've done the opposite--making someone younger than they should be. It happened on One Life to Live, I believe. And it's happened on General Hospital. Just because the actress who plays one character's mom still looks like she's in her early twenties, they've refused to age up her son because she doesn't look "old enough" to have a teenager. And so he's been stuck being seven for the past five years.

Let me guess: Liz, right?  (past GH watcher/TWoP commenter)

The second floor set up of the Conner house always drove me apeshit. I was always thinking, "Were the two bedrooms across the hall? Did EACH have their own bathroom, because the Jack and Jill thing made no sense." 

The way it is now, I assume Harris and Mark are sharing Becky and Darlene's old room, and Darlene is in DJ's, which always seems like the smaller one.  

I remember going online when the actual house that was used for the exterior shots in Evansville, Indiana, went up for sale and they posted pictures. I'll bet that the traffic on that realtor's site was enormous, just from fans curious to see what the "Conner house" looked like from the inside. 

Edited by ChicksDigScars
  • Love 3
On 4/4/2018 at 8:15 AM, Stacey1014 said:

I think Darlene is staying in DJ’s old room and the kids are sharing the girls’ room. 

I’m surprised that we haven’t seen DJ since the pilot episode. I thought we would have seen more of him. 

That makes so much more sense. We could probably assume that DJ's room is smaller than Becky and Darlene's room was, so Darlene would take that.

It's more realistic that we haven't seen DJ. He doesn't live there, and he's busy raising his kid.

  • Love 3
(edited)

I didn't know the right place to post this so I'll just put it here. Watching the repeat today of when David moves in with the Connors I noticed that the set for David's house with his mom is the same set for Crystal's house later in the series. I can't believe I never noticed it before. 

Edited by Maharincess
×
×
  • Create New...