This is going to be a rather strange column for me to write, because it centers on a few subjects that I don't normally write about. In fact, I usually studiously avoid writing about these subjects. But with all the hoo-hah over the reboot of the television sitcom Roseanne, I felt it was time to chime in on popular television culture and my own television viewing preferences. Again, two subjects that I normally strive to avoid, mostly because this just isn't that kind of blog. So if these subjects bore you to death, I'd just stop reading right now. Fair warning.

I have to begin an article about Roseanne with a personal admission. It's been a "guilty pleasure" television show of mine for a while now. I actually completely missed the first-run seasons, as I watched little-to-zero television during the 1980s and 1990s. For most of this time I didn't even own a television set. So I missed Roseanne in its heyday. I still haven't seen a complete episode of Cheers, either, which always seems to astonish people when I admit to it.

But after getting married, I did buy a television. At that point, I started paying attention to late-night television comedians, since a very large slice of the American public gets all its news and politics from such shows. But the shows didn't come on until 11:30, and there wasn't much on just before they aired. So I found myself watching Roseanne reruns.

Full disclosure: I thought they were hilarious. You could even call me "a fan" of the show, at least back then when it was on every night (local syndication reruns did move on to other shows at some point in the late 2000s) and I was a regular viewer. There are a lot of reasons to like the show -- number one being: "it's funny." Roseanne Barr is a brilliant comedian, no matter what else might be said about her. She has an excellent sense of timing, and she is always completely outrageous, no matter the given situation on the show.

But the show was interesting beyond just the one-liners as well. Sit-coms about family life usually fall into two categories: those that change, and those that don't. The best example of the latter is one with a built-in advantage: The Simpsons. Being animated, the show's characters never grow older. Bart and Lisa never grow up, and will never get to high school or college. That isn't possible with live actors, and may be one of the reasons the show is still going strong and setting television records (if a recent couch gag/opening sequence is to be believed, they're about to pass Gunsmoke in total number of episodes aired, which would be a monumental milestone -- making it the longest-running scripted series in all of television history).

Of course, most television programs don't last for three decades, which is why most sitcoms rarely advance their storylines much, even if children are present in the television family. In most series, from the pilot to the finale the main characters have the same jobs, the same house, and the same basic situation in life. Episodes may change the storyline slightly, but the basics remain the same.

Roseanne was different. Change was constant, with the exception of the house they lived in. Money was always a problem, since they had so little of it. It's hard to even accurately count the number of jobs Dan Conner or Roseanne had during the series' original run. Dan was, in turn, a drywall installer, a home-flipper (that one didn't last long), a motorcycle shop owner, until finally settling in as a civil service worker in a garage for the county's vehicles. Roseanne was a plastics factory worker (supervised by none other than a very young George Clooney), a telemarketer (from her own home), a waitress (several times), a hair salon shampooist, until finally settling in as a diner owner. Jackie (Roseanne's sister) started in the plastics factory with Roseanne, became a cop, was a long-distance trucker, until also winding up at Roseanne's diner. While a few of these involved money from nowhere (the seed money for the motorcycle shop most notably), most of the time the Conners were continually scrounging for a buck, doing scut work that was decidedly blue-collar. And those lists are just from memory (although I have admittedly been binge-watching old seasons in the buildup to the reboot), so I've probably left a number of jobs off each character's list -- didn't one of them tend bar at one point? It's hard to recall, because there were so many jobs they cycled through.

Change was the only constant, in other words, unlike most sitcoms. The other notable thing that changed was that the kids grew up. Darlene, in the pilot episode, looks about nine years old (although the actress was actually a few years older). Becky was a couple years older, and D.J. was barely old enough to attend school. By the end, Becky and Darlene were married (Becky having eloped before she was 18), and DJ was having sex with his girlfriend. Darlene, Jackie, and Roseanne all got pregnant and had babies during the lifetime of the show. There aren't many sitcoms that dare to change this many characters' storylines, which was part of what made Roseanne so interesting. It wasn't quite Game Of Thrones (no major character died), but you never really knew what to expect next from the Conners.

As for the reboot, so far it's pretty good. They instantly got renewed for a second season, so they'll have time to develop the new storylines and fill in some of the cracks. They'll probably get some of it right and some of it wrong, but that was always true of the show.

But there are two issues everyone's focused on with Roseanne's reboot: politics and economics. Let's take the politics first. Roseanne Barr (the actress, not the character, in other words) is a Trump supporter. In real life, she's also somewhat of a nutjob on several conspiracy theories, and her own personal politics have not been consistent over the years. So the show chose to make Roseanne Conner a Trump voter.

This caused a lot of deep analysis and angst from people who should really know better. Liberals took the position of: "Roseanne Conner was always a loving individual who hated bigwigs who screwed over the little guy, so of course she's a loyal Democrat and always has been." Conservatives amusingly took the position of: "Liberals are getting really annoyed about this, so let's rub it in!" Donald Trump took the lead on that line of thinking, the day after the reboot pilot aired.

What both sides really miss is that even if Roseanne (the actress) hadn't been a Trump supporter, they probably would have had to make at least one major character on the show a Trump guy or gal. The fictional Lanford, Illinois where the show is set is a couple hours away from Chicago. In other words, smack in the middle of Trump country. It would be downright inconceivable that there wouldn't be plenty of people in Lanford who voted for Trump, in other words, and if the show wanted to accurately portray life there, then they would have had to address this one way or the other.

Of course, they could have just ignored it altogether. But then they might not have chalked up the stellar ratings that they did for the pilot. Exploring a family with members who voted differently in 2016 is actually a very relatable subject to millions of American families right now. The show chose to do so with a light touch -- I don't believe the names Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton were even mentioned (although it was clear enough who was being talked about, the show made a conscious decision not to say the names). There was one brief spat between anti-Trump Jackie and pro-Trump Roseanne, and then they largely moved away from the subject.

Even this light touch was too much for some people. And for others, it wasn't enough. Some correctly argued that the original Roseanne almost never addressed any political issues at all, mostly because they were too caught up in their own lives to care. When you're scrambling to put food on the table and wondering if your job's going to be around next week, it's hard to focus on national politics, in other words. And -- this is key -- that is true of millions of American families. Not everybody lives and breathes politics. So they could have easily gotten away with avoiding the subject altogether. There's a strong case to be made for why interjecting politics was a big change for the show. But then again, the show's always been about changing storylines, right?

The other argument being made right now is that the characters didn't delve into politics enough. Why didn't Jackie make a better argument about Obamacare? Why would Roseanne be hoodwinked by Trumpism? Roseanne was always a feminist, so why would she support such a blatant misogynist? People making this argument want the show to stand in for the national political debate writ large, so it can cover all aspects of the deeper arguments. But that's not really a sitcom at all, it'd be more propaganda than comedy. Or, if balanced, it'd be a Sunday-morning public affairs show (which is not where I usually tune in to see comedy). After the initial foray into politics, the show has moved on to much more mundane sitcom subjects, and this will probably be the norm much more than political debates in future episodes (although they can always come back to politics if need be). Which is probably as it should be.

The second subject the Roseanne reboot has everyone talking about is blue-collar television. Her show is held up as a paragon of working-class life, to the exclusion of all others. In fact, most of the people commenting on the blue-collar nature of the show seem to have forgotten the long history of such shows on television. Roseanne is treated as a rare and unusual show, but it's really not all that unique in economic terms. It was just more successful than a lot of other such shows, at the most. Or maybe more recent, perhaps.

Television history is actually chock-full of blue-collar sitcoms. The granddaddy of them all was The Honeymooners, a show that only ran one season but had an outsized influence about what type of family could be portrayed on television. Ralph Kramden was a bus driver. A good argument could be made that one of the most well-loved sitcoms of all time -- I Love Lucy -- was fairly blue-collar (if not exactly traditional in the husband's line of work). Lucy and Desi weren't exactly rolling in dough or living in an impossibly-beyond-their-means house. From the same era came the granddaddy of animated blue-collar sitcoms, The Flintstones. Fred worked in a quarry and loved to go to his lodge or the bowling alley. You can't get much more blue-collar than that.

Skip forward a generation and you come to one of the best sitcoms of all time -- All In The Family. Archie Bunker was a dockworker and cab-driver. This was also a pioneering show in making political arguments a central feature, which was wildly successful. From the same era, there was also Sanford and Son, about a junk dealer and his son, Good Times, and Laverne and Shirley where the two women worked in a beer factory.

Blue-collar shows continued throughout the 1980s and beyond as well, including Married With Children (Al Bundy was a shoe salesman), Cheers (a cross-section of society drank in the bar, including blue-collar types), and of course The Simpsons. Although, admittedly, while Homer hasn't changed his full-time job at all, the show has gotten pretty far away from its roots as basically an updated version of The Flintstones. While in the earlier years Homer's workplace gave birth to many episodes and story arcs, these days they've gone beyond such mundane storylines for the most part. But watch any of the first five or ten years of Simpsons episodes, and you'll see the same sort of storylines as on all the other blue-collar sitcoms.

More recently, we've had The George Lopez Show, The King of Queens, King of the Hill (apparently there are a lot of kings in the blue-collar world...), 2 Broke Girls, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and Shameless, just to name a few.

Beyond the strict blue-collar designation, there have also been other shows where being poor was pretty central to the story or the background. Some of these shows it was just a peripheral thing pretty much unconnected from the dialog (shows like The Dukes of Hazzard or The Wire), while in other shows it was central to the plot (Everybody Hates Chris and The PJs). Even historical dramas often had poverty or near-poverty as a central part of the family situation (Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons).

Different socioeconomic situations have always been on television, when you look at the record. Whether a show is set in poverty (whether rural or urban) or explores the socioeconomic divide, difference in relative wealth has always been ripe for both drama and comedy. You could even make a case that Gilligan's Island had a few things to say about the one percent. Much more common, though, is the age-old "rags to riches" story, which television has long been fond of, right back to The Beverly Hillbillies. Or, more recently, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The most amusing one of these I regularly watched was an interesting twist on the rags-to-riches story, because the "riches" in My Name Is Earl were pretty paltry, but that was enough to elevate the main character into a benevolent philanthropist (even though he only had something like $100,000 in lottery winnings to hand out). The royalty theme continues in these titles, as we've gone from kings (of Queens or the hill) to minor royalty: dukes, princes, and earls.

Of course, there have always been plenty of shows -- sitcoms especially -- where all the characters live glorious lives untouched by money problems in any way, living so far beyond their means it isn't even funny. The usual classic example of this is Friends, with their spacious apartments that they seemed to live in rent-free. In New York City.

Some series even change, over time, from being socioeconomically aware to living in fantasy worlds where money drops off the trees. I watched Parenthood for its first few seasons, because it portrayed (more or less accurately) an extended family trying to make it in Berkeley, California, which is not a cheap place to live. Some family members had high-paying jobs, others didn't. Some had money emergencies, and some didn't. Jobs were occasionally lost. Foreclosure was an option. But then at some point, everything became so peachy-keen that they must have all won big lotteries that they didn't tell us about. One character with a freelance work record buys a home in Berkeley to impress his girlfriend/fiancée/wife, and later teams up with his brother to open a recording studio on Haight Street in San Francisco, as a lark. Another gets annoyed at the public school system and opens her own private school in Berkeley (with no mention of how it was paid for). Can't remember whether that was before or after she ran for mayor. This is the usual thing in some television shows, but it was a jarring change in the more-realistic plotlines they had been building for the first few years.

But shows change, which seems like a good place to bring this soliloquy to an end. Roseanne was probably the most jarring example of this out of all the blue-collar shows throughout television history. In the final season (and because it was the final season), they completely ran off the rails, in hilarious fashion. The Conners won over $100 million in the lottery and have to learn how to live as wealthy people. Merriment ensues. At the end of the year, the finale explains that it was all in Roseanne's imagination, as she launched a career as a writer. Dan was either alive or dead, depending on what you believed.

The new reboot glossed over this, as expected. There were no lottery winnings. It was all a fantastical dream. Dan was still alive. The show went on.

No matter where you stand on any of the Roseanne political arguments, that is what is worth admiring, at least for the time being. The show goes on. Maybe, like Archie Bunker, Roseanne's current politics might soften over time. Who knows? Or maybe she'll dig her heels in and refuse to listen to Jackie. She certainly has in the past, on many occasions. Roseanne has so far (three episodes in) done an admirable job of carrying on the tradition of portraying blue-collar life on television -- a tradition it was already a big part of. But Roseanne certainly wasn't the only show to cover this ground. The theme goes all the way back to Jackie Gleason, please remember.

I don't see Roseanne as a show that only one side of the political divide can watch and enjoy, which I think is a good thing in the end. How can we ever talk across the political divide if we're not even supposed to watch television shows the other side likes, after all? Maybe it's just my personal bias. As I've already admitted, watching Roseanne was always somewhat of a guilty pleasure for me. Politics aside, the show has retained the most crucial thing imaginable -- it's still funny. Roseanne really predated the wide use of the term "snarky," but her character pretty much defines it, as she always did. Whatever her personal politics, her skills as a comedian have not atrophied at all. So I, for one, will keep watching. I don't care if they talk politics or not, and if they do I certainly don't care whether they manage to solve the country's political divide in one episode or not. That's never what I watched the show for previously, and that certainly hasn't changed.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant