MUCH has happened in America since the raucous and much-loved US TV sitcom Roseanne ended its ninth and final season back in 1997. The country has endured 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and witnessed the first black President and now President Trump. It has also seen an opioid epidemic, which in 2016 alone killed more Americans than died in the entire Vietnam war.

Back in its Emmy-winning heyday, the ABC hit series spoke for America’s blue-collar legions as few other shows did. Now the Illinois-based Conner family, headed by Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) and her husband Dan (John Goodman), are back, still aiming to speak for the country’s working class.

Sara Gilbert, who returns to her role as Darlene Connor and has executive-produced the returning series, says because the working class is still “grossly under-represented” on US TV, considerable efforts have been made to get the details exactly right. Focus groups were held and interviews were conducted with blue-collar families. The promotional push for the new series invites viewers to “explore life, death and everything in between through the relatable, hilarious and brutally honest lens of the Conner household”.

At the heart of the Conners, of course, is Roseanne Barr, who plays the TV matriarch to end them all. She was born in Salt Lake City in 1952, to a working-class Jewish family. She worked the circuits as a stand-up comedian before finally getting her break in 1985. Top producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner had an idea for a bold new TV show centred on a working mother, and when they saw Barr on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson they liked what they saw.

“I was wooed by producers in Hollywood, who told me they wanted to turn my act into a sitcom,” Barr wrote in New York magazine in 2011. Carsey, she said, “presented herself as a sister in arms. I was a cutting-edge comic, and she said she got that I wanted to do a realistic show about a strong mother who was not a victim of Patriarchal Consumerist Bullshit—in other words, the persona I had carefully crafted over eight previous years in dive clubs and biker bars: a fierce working-class Domestic Goddess.

“It was 1987, and it seemed people were primed and ready to watch a sitcom that didn’t have anything like the rosy glow of middle-class confidence and comfort, and didn’t try to fake it." ABC seemed to agree. They picked up Roseanne in 1988.

But that first season, she added, was “god-awful” thanks to “staggering sexism and class bigotry.” Her ideas had been stolen, she said. The opening credits of the pilot made it clear that the show had been “created by Matt Williams”, the writer on Cosby. Barr was “devastated and felt so betrayed” that she left the premiere party.

She confronted Carsey who, she says, started crying. “Cry all you want to,” Barr told her, “but you figure out a way to put my name on the show I created, or kiss my ass goodbye.”

Her efforts to remedy the situation led to her having a nervous breakdown.

She also had a dispute with a female producer over the fictional Roseanne’s clothes. The producer said she and her colleagues didn’t like the way Barr chose to portray the character. “This is no f------ character!” Barr said angrily. “This is my show, and I created it – not Matt, and not Carsey-Werner, and not ABC. You watch me. I will win this battle if I have to kill every last white bitch in high heels around here.”

Eventually, matters were stabilised and Barr got her own way. She “enjoyed” firing various writers, “but at least everyone began to credit me.” She promoted several female assistants to full writers and, she says, gave Joss Whedon and Judd Apatow their first writing jobs.

Roseanne was the most-watched show on American TV in 1980 and 1990 and consistently featured amongst the top 10 rated shows. Barr herself became wealthy beyond her wildest expectations.

Viewers took in their enthusiastic millions to the affectionate on-screen relationship between Barr and Goodman. They saw the show as one that accurately depicted the fears and the everyday lives of working-class Americans, all without patronising them. Barr herself was seen as a female TV trailblazer. As she wrote in 2011: “I and the mostly great writers in charge of crafting the show – every week never forgot that we needed to make people laugh, but the struggle to survive, and to break taboos, was equally important. And that was my goal from the beginning.”

Barr, who now lives on a macadamia nut farm in Hawaii with her long-term partner Johnny Argent, only agreed to take part in the new show when she learned that Goodman was in.

She came out for Donald Trump in 2016. "I think we would be so lucky if Trump won, because then it wouldn’t be Hillary,” she said, dismissing Clinton as merely someone who was friends with "everybody that gives her any goddamned money."

Trump tweeted in return: “Thank you Roseanne, very much appreciated.”

Her fictional counterpart has now become a Trump supporter, too. As Barr said on US TV recently: “I’ve always attempted to portray a realistic portrait of the American people and working-class people, and in fact, it was working-class people who elected Trump, so I felt that yeah, that was very real, and something that needed to be discussed and especially about polarisation in the family, and people actually hating other people for the way they voted, which I feel is not American.”

Now, the Conners, and Roseanne, are back. Variety magazine delivered an honest appraisal of the first three episodes, in the course of which it said: “The Conners cohabit with, or sometimes fully inhabit, the worst parts of our country .... Roseanne’s gift is that it neither ignores the ugliness nor condemns it; it honestly engages with these unpalatable elements of American life, trappings that most other shows find a way to gloss over.”