The Conners’ showrunner has confirmed what fans have long suspected: that Jackie’s son, Andy, who has been conspicuously absent throughout the show’s revival, won’t be on the series, TVLine reports. That’s because the show’s writers and producers will be proceeding as if he never existed.
Fans who watched the original series know that Jackie had a baby, Andy, who was “born” in an August 1994 episode of Season 6. However, that was also the time in the original show’s run where things took a turn towards the fantastical (and, according to some fans and critics, ridiculous). Dan died. Roseanne won the lottery.
And it was all later revealed to have been an extended dream sequence.
Showrunner Bruce Helford says that, in bringing back Roseanne for its revival, and then morphing it into The Conners following nameake star Roseanne Barr’s exit from the show, he and his team made the decision to treat the birth of Andy as part of the extended dream sequence.
“We made a conscious decision that certain years were going to be part of the dream that was revealed at the end of the run of the original ‘Roseanne,’ and [Andy] was part of the dream. Andy fell into the same category for us as winning the lottery; [it’s] something we chose not to acknowledge,” Helford says.
Helford had dropped hints about Andy’s absence before. Just a year or so ago, he obliquely referenced the idea of Andy’s non-existence.
“He’d probably be off at college if he does exist,” Helford said at the time.
However, star and producer Sara Gilbert isn’t so quick to write Andy off.
“In my mind it’s not off the table entirely,” she says, noting that some of the writers think there might be a way to work him back into the show in a way that makes sense.
Andy isn’t the first Roseanne character to be given the “retroactive continuity” treatment. You may remember that Dan died in the show’s original run but turned up in the first scene of the revival, alive and well. The show’s writers treated the jarring break in continuity as a joke: Roseanne and Dan joked with each other about everyone thinking he was dead even though he’s not.
Another Roseanne character still appears to exist within The Conners ‘ universe but yet does not appear on the show. You may remember that, during the show’s original run, Dan and Roseanne had a fourth child, Jerry. In an early episode of The Conners , Jerry was obliquely referenced as working on a riverboat somewhere, and hasn’t been mentioned since.