Best "Roseanne" Moments!

There weren't that many really good episodes in the first season, but this is a great one. Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) stops Dan (John Goodman) from fighting at his birthday party at the Lobo Lounge, and later at home he takes out his frustration in a realistically frightening way on a piece of drywall as daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert) looks on, scared and saying nothing.

Roseanne ends a goofy physical fight with Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) by grimly showing her what could happen if she decides to become a police officer.

During the end credits Dan and Roseanne try to move a refrigerator out of the house and cuss in a constant, over the top, bleeped barrage.

Dan, warming up for a Thanksgiving day football game, moves the couch in one huge charge. Dude was willing to be very physical.

From the first really great episode (written by Joss Whedon). Darlene is rebelling against reading her prize poem in public, and Roseanne opens up the topic while cutting coupons by silently extending her hand with the scissors in them.

Darlene reads her poem, which reveals unsuspected vulnerability. The frozen look on Gilbert's face is perfect.

Roseanne was always great at depicting weaselly bosses (I could never vote for Fred Thompson after seeing him play Roseanne's evil factory boss in season one). Brian (Peter Smith) was really well-written: young, tyrannical, insecure, clueless, sad. Roseanne has him over to dinner to ask for better hours only to have him fire her anyhow as her family freaks out.

DJ (Michael Fishman) fills his cereal bowl by adding some, swiping some off, adding some more, and swiping again. From a great real-time episode that shows whole family waiting for results of Roseanne's pregnancy test.

The whole family walks in on Darlene making out with a friend, only Dan has no idea what's going on. The show uses the device of Dan's cluelessness really well more than once.

"I've got a Salisbury steak and a Swiss steak. Who gets the Salisbury steak? Okay then, you'd be the person to ask: which one is it?

[Puts plate down]

Enjoy your, uh, thing."

-- Roseanne's first day as a waitress at Rodbell's.

Becky (Alicia Goranson) and Darlene find unexplained evidence of DJ's weirdness.

"What was once the cradle of our love is now landfill."

-- Roseanne and Dan toast their old mattress at the Lobo.

Roseanne confronts Becky's principal (another great weasel, played by Dann Florek) about her kid's behavior in an inspired little speech about mothering:
"No matter how much we try to control what our kids do, at some point they are just gonna do what they're gonna do. They are like people that way."

The woman Dan has been having erotic dreams about (played by Patrika Darbo) is revealed. The fact that she a chubby little thing shocked me to the bone the first time I saw this episode; the show in these seasons still seems ahead of its time with regard to size by just letting its large (main) characters just be, most of the time.

Dan and Roseanne go out to dinner to celebrate the first time they had sex, and tell each other what they first noticed about each other.

Becky is staying at Jackie's after a fight with Roseanne, and Roseanne, missing her, starts crying after seeing Becky's copy of AC/DC's Highway to Hell.

Dan: Too thick, Beck?
Becky: I think I just broke a rib.

-- Dan and Becky make up after a fight by having milkshakes.

Bonnie (Bonnie Bramlett), a fellow Rodbell's waitress, breaks out in a great version of "You Really Got a Hold on Me" at a barbecue (Bramlett is a singer, the first white Ikette with Ike and Tina Turner and half of Delaney & Bonnie on Stax Records).

Dan: I remember when I first found that bike. Just a rusted-out piece of junk. But I saw the potential. I took it back to the shop--pounded out the dents--chromed it--repainted it--
Roseanne: Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring. Get to the part where I smoked the guy into buying it.

-- Roseanne and Dan are gloating over a check after finally selling a cycle.

"I'm 36 years old. I've got flabby arm and pelican neck, and all my houseplants are dead and no one loves me, but what difference does that make anyway, because everything in my life sucks!"

-- Jackie, flailing to explain a dumb decision to sleep with Arnie (Tom Arnold).

From the first episode in which Darlene starts to become depressed, a plot development that the show, contrary to every sitcom rule, lets simmer unresolved over the course of the season.
[the phone rings]
Roseanne: Darlene, it's for you.
Darlene: Who is it?
Roseanne: It's Marcy.
Darlene: What's she want?
Roseanne: I don't know what she--[getting mad, throwing phone across floor] She wants you to pick up the phone.

"You look like that Fonzie fellow who's so popular."

-- Becky's grandmother (Estelle Parsons) to Becky's boyfriend, Mark (Glenn Quinn). Great episode, with extremely realistic, territorial conflict between Dan and his mother-in-law.

"Listen, Darlene. What I would do, or Mr. X. would do, is not the point. You're asking me what you should do, right? Well, let me put it this way: You have never in your life done anything just to please somebody else. Why start now?"

-- Dan's advice to Darlene, who is asking him how to handle a boy who's interested in her.

Another virtuoso scene from Metcalf who runs around Dan and Roseanne's kitchen making breakfast, not realizing that their power's been cut off.

Roseanne: I would never have moved in with no guy so damn fast.
Jackie: Maybe you wouldn't, but this isn't you, it's me, and there's a real easy way to tell us apart. [Gesturing] You -- me. YOU -- ME."