MW 'The Conners' tries to 'find the funny' in dementia, elder scams and difficult parents
By Beth Pinsker
You'd be surprised by the laughs you can get from a bungled attempt at credit-card fraud
It's not easy to walk into the writers room of a comedy show and pitch dementia as the topic of the day. And, go.
But that's what the producers of "The Conners," Bruce Helford and Dave Caplan, did last season when they decided that the character played by 96-year-old Estelle Parsons would face cognitive decline - and that the rest of the characters on the show would be confronted with trying to pay for her care. There are nearly 50 million caregivers in the U.S. facing a similar situation, so it's no wonder the revival of the 1980s hit "Roseanne" has been a comedy-ratings leader that's now in its sixth season.
Parsons's character, Beverly Harris, is no cuddly granny who knits sweaters and bakes cookies. Ever since the actress, who won an Academy Award in 1968 for "Bonnie & Clyde," introduced the character on "Roseanne," she has been a foil who could one-up the rest of the cast in being crass and uncaring. And dementia hasn't softened Bev much over the past two seasons.
In a conversation with MarketWatch, Caplan said his favorite scene with the character is one in which her daughter Jackie, played by Laurie Metcalf, feels like time is running out for her to unburden herself to her mother. "She says all the things she never got to say, and she finally unloads," he says.
"And it's not things like 'I love you,'" Helford chimes in.
"No, it's just all things she wanted to get off her chest. And she finishes, and Bev says something which makes Jackie realize she doesn't know whether she heard her or not. And she has to decide whether to try to repeat the entire thing or just live with the fact that maybe her mother never knows how she felt," says Caplan. "I thought that was pretty poignant."
Along with the emotions that come with caring for a difficult parent, "The Conners," which airs on Wednesdays on ABC $(DIS)$, also has taken on how extraordinarily expensive caregiving can be - especially caring for a person with dementia, and especially for a family that is just barely getting by. Helford and Caplan wanted to address that head-on, but with humor. Here's what they had to say about the development of the Bev storyline:
MarketWatch: Why did you decide to delve into such serious subject matter?
Bruce Helford: The initial dementia story started because, as we always try to do on "The Conners," it's really about the economics of life for a working-class family. I can't imagine many more things that are as dire and painful as trying to care for a loved one with that kind of a problem - when you don't have much money, when you don't have much insurance. So it really started out being about the difficulties of helping her.
Dave Caplan: We wanted to do a story where Jackie just wasn't at all prepared for her mom's illness and retirement. We just sort of generally liked the area that taking care of an older parent is kind of a blind spot that you don't plan for. You do financial planning for your kids to send them to college, and then for your retirement. You think it's over, and then you go, oh, yeah, I forgot something: I didn't plan at all for a parent to get old.
MarketWatch: You both have personal experience with this with your own families. Did you consult with any experts or other sources to make sure you were authentic?
Caplan: My father-in-law passed away from Alzheimer's and my mother is in an assisted-living home. We never hesitate to reach out to anyone we need to. And there are resources available to us. Plus, I'm a psychologist. So we have one of those in house for certain kinds of behavioral things.
Helford: And of course, ABC and the production company have legal teams that advise us about things that we should be checking into if, you know, if there's something that we're incorrect about, or something that needs to be fixed.
MarketWatch: It can be a fine line to walk, balancing all of this with comedy. Reality isn't always convenient or funny. How do you pull it off?
Helford: For "The Conners" and "Roseanne" before it, we're always digging into deep areas that are uncomfortable to discuss. We don't mind people feeling a little uneasy in their chairs if we feel we've opened a discussion. I can't tell you how many people contacted us the minute we started doing the stories about dementia who have gone through it. Even just in our writers room. Dave and I have both been through it with a couple of relatives. Everybody is facing the same very, very difficult things.
Caplan: It's a bit of a tightrope act to do these kinds of stories in a comedy. There's a leap of faith that we engage in when we say we're going to discuss this part of a character's journey, but we're going to figure out how to find the funny in it. I think more often than not, we do.
Helford: When there is a painful story, the audience looks for that moment of release, that one place where they can laugh, and the Conners are known for surviving through their humor.
MarketWatch: There's one storyline this season where Bev is charging a lot to her credit card, and the other characters discuss what happens to her bills after she dies. Then they decide to charge some expensive items for themselves, thinking that it will all magically go away. They get into a pretty deep discussion of what debts are discharged in death, and the mechanics of elder fraud. Where did that come from?
Helford: That came from our own experience. My mother had terminal cancer, and she built up about $70,000 in credit-card bills. As a good son, I called the company to clear it up, and the woman on the phone said, "Oh no, we write that off. You don't need to worry about that at all. The company is fine with that." I don't know if that was standard practice, or if that is just something that happens. Most people don't know about it, but it's something the credit-card people are used to.
MarketWatch: I wish I had talked to that person about my mom's credit-card balance after she died, because they seemed happy to take my money for it. Technically, the estate owes the bill, if it's legitimate, but it doesn't pass on to heirs. When you settle the estate, they can ask for it.
Helford: I guess it depends on the person you get on the other end of the line. I really tried, but that woman kept saying, this is something that we are used to, we take it as a loss. I'm sure they wrote it off on their books as a loss to defer taxes along the way somewhere.
Marketwatch: The characters don't spend much time debating the morality of racking up charges for things they've coveted, like a new computer and a fancy TV. Did you contemplate the morality of it for them?
Helford: The Conners can be scoundrels. And also, they are very much about survival. We had them almost get in big trouble for charging up the card. If Bev had not said it was her charges, and that she has dementia, they would have definitely been caught on fraud.
MarketWatch: In a recent episode, Bev started taking a new treatment and is functioning well enough to go off on her own on a train to have adventures. Will she be back, or was that a kind of Viking funeral?
Helford: Not this season, but we've left it open intentionally. She didn't quite make a recovery, but we did a lot of research into the things that are happening now that are slowing down cognitive decline. The actress is just a phenomenal human being, and we wanted to leave it open for when, God willing, she will be around to come back. But at this moment, as we said in one later episode, she's out there hopping boxcars and stealing apple pies off windowsills.
-Beth Pinsker
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April 17, 2024 06:39 ET (10:39 GMT)
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