A TikTok supercut of Dan Conner's angry moments on Roseanne has turned into an argument running to hundreds of replies. 'How did we never notice all the anger and borderline Domestic violence in this show?!' asked the reader who reposted it. The clips are captioned as they go, one of them reading: 'DAN'S ANGER: SMASHING THINGS TO VENT SCARES THE KIDS.'
Much of the argument has moved past Dan himself. It is about where a line sits, who draws it, and whether showing something amounts to endorsing it.
Where the Line Sits
Most of the better-received replies argued the compilation mislabels what it shows. 'Punching a wall is in no way shape or form the same as punching a person,' one ran. 'Physical violence against a person is one thing, but people are allowed to get angry.'
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A smaller group went to the definition and found it wider. 'It's violence in a home by a member of the household. That's the definition of domestic violence,' one reader wrote. 'It's arguably not domestic abuse since it isn't inflicting direct harm on a person, but it is violence.'
What the Show Actually Did
Readers pointed to storylines where the series dealt with violence directly. In the fifth season the Conners work out that Jackie's boyfriend has been hitting her. Dan beats him up, is arrested, and comes home to Jackie telling him he had no right, asking how he could do something that stupid for her.
A later episode goes further. DJ takes the family car on a dare, gets stuck in the mud and says nothing; police find it in a ditch. Roseanne hits him, and what follows is an argument, not a verdict. 'It's not that big a deal,' says Dan. Jackie disagrees, reminding him he did not grow up in their house. When Dan says DJ had it coming, Jackie's answer is: 'She was out of control! It was just like Dad!' Roseanne tells them both to shut up and leave her alone. Later she calls DJ down. 'I'm really sorry that I hit you,' she tells him. 'It was totally wrong.' Her own father hit her a lot, she says, and promises never to hit DJ again, no matter what he does.
Why Nobody Noticed
A recurring answer to the original question: readers recognised the house. One said they had thought Dan a good dad compared with a lot of fathers they knew. Another, in one of the most endorsed replies of that kind, described a father who behaved much the same way, said the clips had never looked unusual, and noted the nineties were different and that they try to be better for their own children.
A third put the generational arithmetic less kindly: people want a clean break from how they were raised, when what usually happens is a partial improvement on the one before. 'My dad has definitely lost his temper and flipped a table,' one reader wrote. 'This was completely normal until very recently.'
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Others were less sure, noting that children who are never hit can still flinch at a raised voice. Roseanne ran on ABC for 9 seasons from 1988 and traded on its realism. Nearly forty years on, some viewers are deciding that household was not ordinary after all.
