Most of the original cast returned when Roseanne was revived for a new generation. However, the title character’s youngest child was conspicuously absent from the reboot – so what happened to him?

Reviving Roseanne was a surprisingly complicated affair. After all, one main character was supposed to be dead; another of the sitcom’s actors had sadly passed away since the series’ end. Furthermore, most of what had happened in the show’s last season was supposed to be a fiction-within-a-fiction, meaning the revival would likely have to forget that that whole run had ever happened.

Fans were reassured, though, as more news started filtering out about the new shows; all the old characters seemed to be coming back, at least. But there was one notable person missing from the proposed cast lineup: Roseanne’s son Jerry Garcia, who would have grown into an adult in the decades that the show was off the air.

Back in the ’90s, though, Roseanne was big. Its portrayal of a working-class family had an authentic feel, and the lovable Conner family had always entertained audiences with their plain-speaking attitudes and romantic entanglements. The sitcom was a hit with the public to boot; from 1989 to 1990, the show was the most watched in the whole of America.

It perhaps wasn’t surprising, then, that Roseanne was brought back for a long-awaited tenth series in 2018. After all, the show had been fondly remembered for years after its last episode aired in 1997. A reboot had been rumored for a while, in fact, but it was only in 2017 that it was officially announced as taking place.

Still, there was a lot of work to do in order to have the revival make any sort of sense. For starters, the original run of Roseanne had ended with a shock twist: John Goodman’s Dan had been dead for a while, and Roseanne had simply created a story where he was still alive. Therefore, the new production team would have to reverse the twist and bring him back.

But as it happens, the new show ended up going down perhaps the funniest route: simply pretending the twist had never happened. In the very first episode of the revived series, Roseanne tells a just-woken-up Dan that she believed he was dead, not asleep. “Why does everybody always think I’m dead?” Dan asks her. Problem solved!

And, thankfully for all concerned, the revived show was a hit. It also received an 81 percent approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, which is no small feat. The Detroit News said, for instance, that the reboot erased the “sour ending” of Roseanne’s final season, since Dan was alive and well. However, there was another thing that the rebooted series could have erased – but chose not to.

In series eight of the show, Roseanne had given birth to another baby. This was done for one simple reason: the real Roseanne genuinely was pregnant. And even though the character of Roseanne was told in the series that she was carrying a girl, when Barr gave birth to a boy the gender was switched around. Barr’s real son was called Buck; Conner, on the other hand, named her son Jerry Garcia after the singer of seminal rock band the Grateful Dead.

Baby Jerry was portrayed by twins, as is often the case with infants or young children on television. One famous example of this is the appearance of the Olsen twins, Mary Kate and Ashley, on Full House – another family sitcom that debuted around the same time Roseanne did and was also similarly revived. And Jerry was played by babies Cole and Morgan Roberts, neither of whom went on to pursue acting careers.

What’s more, it was initially unclear whether Jerry Garcia would be in the Roseanne revival – or, indeed, if he would even be mentioned at all. People speculated that perhaps, just like with the death of Dan, the birth of Roseanne’s fourth child would be erased from the show altogether. However, during the 2018 Winter TCA press tour, the cast did address the situation. Jerry was still around, they said, but absent.

And the premiere episode of the new Roseanne did reveal to audiences just what had become of Jerry. When the family said grace at the table, Roseanne mentioned her youngest child in her prayers. “Please watch over our son Jerry who’s on that stupid fishing boat, where apparently they don’t get phone calls,” she said.

Within the timeline of the show, baby Jerry Garcia would be a man of 22 by the time Roseanne came back on air. He’d also presumably have an adventurous spirit if he was out on an isolated fishing boat. But with so much else going on in the Roseanne revival, perhaps the writers simply didn’t have time to tell his story.

There was, after all, a lot to deal with when it was decided that Roseanne would come back. Chief among these conundrums was the issue of Becky, the oldest Conner daughter, who was played by not one but two actresses. The character was initially portrayed by Lecy Goranson, but when Goranson went to college she left the role of Becky vacant. Sarah Chalke then took over, and when Goranson returned for series eight she and Chalke shared the role. But who would get the nod to play Becky for series ten?

Well, the revival solved the situation by having Goranson back as Becky and casting Chalke alongside her as a new character, Andrea. Andrea is a woman who hires Becky to be her surrogate, and plenty of jokes are made about how much the two ladies look alike. Both actresses were also pleased that they could appear together in the same scenes.

But the biggest Roseanne problem of all came from a real-life tragedy. On the original show, Irish actor Glenn Quinn had played Mark Healy, Becky’s boyfriend-turned-husband and one of the show’s most popular characters. Sadly, though, Quinn had died of a heroin overdose in 2002, after suffering from drug addiction for many years.

As it turned out, the reboot opted not to recast the character of Mark but instead honor Quinn’s memory. Mark had died, it explains on the show, and Becky is having a difficult time dealing with his passing. Darlene and David’s son is also named Mark, after his deceased uncle.

All in all, the reboot of Roseanne did a good job staying true to the spirit of the original, even though some circumstances were against it. But fans are definitely curious about whether Jerry will be back. And it should be mentioned that there’s another child of the family missing too. Andy, the son of Jackie and Dan’s workmate Fred, has also gone from the revived show.

Image: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

But during her Television Critics Association panel in January 2018, just prior to the rebooted show coming back, Barr did field questions about those two particular characters. “We do mention Jerry Garcia Conner in, I think, the first show,” she said. “He is on a fishing boat in Alaska, and we haven’t dealt with Andy, [Jackie’s son], yet, either.”

Barr continued, however, “But we had so many stories to tell over the arc of these [first] nine episodes that we were hoping for another season to bring more clarity to those characters.” And she and the rest of the cast were lucky in that regard. On March 30, 2018, before season ten was even over, Roseanne was renewed for an 11th season.

And there are plenty of stories that the Roseanne writers can tell about Jerry in season 11. One writer even came up with a theory about him. The now-grown up Jerry, journalist Justin Kirkland suggested in the April 2018 issue of Esquire, was the meta “writer” of the revived series in the timeline where Dan died. He was working on his mother’s original story and improving it.

Image: ABC/Robert Trachtenberg via IndieWire

Chances are high that that particular theory won’t turn out to be the case, though. It would require killing Dan off yet again, for one. But it’s clear that fans really want to know what happened to Jerry and what impact he might have on the show, should he ever get off that fishing boat. Hopefully, then, we’ll find out in season 11 where he’s been and what he’s done.