The Conners premiere: John Goodman, Sara Gilbert talk life without Roseanne

Tuesday night is going to be one of the most-important nights for ABC in quite some time. After all, the premiere of The Conners is going to be coming on at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, and there is a great deal of mystery surrounding precisely how it’s going to do. It’s a conundrum in that many of its viewers may have been Roseanne supporters, but yet the ratings were so huge for the revival that it made perfect sense to bring it back without her. It was hard to justify anything else from a business perspective.

Yet, we’re not going to know until the ratings come in tomorrow as to whether or not this was actually a good move worth making.

Leading up to tonight’s premiere, John Goodman and Sara Gilbert appeared on Good Morning America with Michael Strahan in order to discuss coming back to the show this year, life without Roseanne, and the desire to continue to tell some more stories within this world. Both think that there is room to explore this family and their lives now even without Roseanne; as a matter of fact, losing that figure on the show may lead to many of the characters trying to assess more in terms of where they stand. There’s room for some interesting dynamics here and, at least to date, the reviews for the series have been mixed. There are at least some out there who feel like, at least creatively, there are a few more stories still left to tell here.

You can still tell from this interview, though, that filming The Conners is a strange experiment more or less in transition for Gilbert and Goodman — they have to basically retrain themselves being around all of these people and then not Roseanne, who was one of the chief creative voices on the series. Moving into this new mold could really take a little bit of time.

Related – Be sure to get some other news right now when it comes to The Conners!

What do you want to see on The Conners, and are you planning to check out the series? Be sure to share right now in the attached comments. (Photo: ABC.)