• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 8, 2018

ABC is holding its "Conners" cards close to its vest.

With only eight days until its debut (on Tuesday, October 16, at 8 p.m. Eastern), no preview video of the show’s first episode has been made available to TV columnists, and there is no word yet on whether there will be one available to watch before the show premieres.

“The Conners” is the long-awaited spinoff of the ill-fated “Roseanne” reboot that imploded last June after Roseanne Barr posted her incendiary, racially-tinged tweet about a former aide to President Obama.

By all indications, “The Conners” intends to be “Roseanne,” but without the show's titular star.

Roseanne herself said in an interview over the summer that the absence of her character, Roseanne Conner, will be blamed on the character's death from an opioid overdose, though this scenario has yet to be officially confirmed by ABC. Indeed, the network has revealed few details about the show.

If the death of the character is true, the new show will inevitably start out with the Conner family in mourning, which is not exactly the best way to launch a TV comedy.

The premiere episode is the first of an initial 10 episodes that ABC has ordered. It is titled “Keep On Truckin’ ”.

The episode’s “log line” (show description) gives only this brief, vague synopsis: “A sudden turn of events forces the Conners to face the daily struggles of life in Lanford in a way they never have before.”

ABC is providing no descriptions of subsequent episodes. The only video clip provided on the publicity site is a promo spot that began running recently on ABC. It ran at least once last Tuesday night during “Dancing With the Stars.”

Very little can be learned from the promo except that one scene has Darlene (Sara Gilbert) talking about the upcoming holidays of Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas with her Aunt Jackie (Laurie Metcalf).

ABC is evidently keeping much of what the new show will be like under wraps in a bid to generate interest and viewer sampling on Night One next week.

On the other hand, it won’t be too surprising to see some of the show’s stars turning up on the talk-show circuit this week. If that’s the case, it is still part of ABC's strategy to generate as much interest as possible as close to the premiere as it can.

“The Conners” is already the most talked-about new fall show on the broadcast networks because the show that preceded it last spring did so well in the ratings that it was hailed as a new network TV phenomenon.

It emerged briefly as a kind of flagship show for ABC, with Roseanne herself making a splash on stage at the network’s upfront presentation last May at Lincoln Center in New York.

Just weeks later, the whole thing blew up. Now, with the premiere of “The Conners” almost upon us, we will all get a chance to see what ABC produced from the wreckage of its short-lived phenomenon from last season.

This show, which is essentially “Roseanne” from the ’80s and ’90s transported in its entirety to the present day, is one of several high-profile reboots in the new fall season.

The one it resembles most is the “Murphy Brown” revival on CBS, which has already premiered. That show is also a relic from the ’80s and ’90s. And like the new “Roseanne” last season, the new “Murphy Brown” is playing politics.

“Murphy Brown” and its title character are clearly liberal. Roseanne Conner was unapologetically right-leaning in the new “Roseanne” that premiered last March.

When the new “Roseanne” soared in the ratings, pundits felt it was because it served an audience that up until then was not being served by prime-time television – the roughly half of all Americans who identify as Republicans, conservatives and/or Donald Trump supporters.

With Roseanne gone from “The Conners,” it remains to be seen if any other character, such as her husband Dan (John Goodman, pictured above), will take up Roseanne's working-class Trump-supporting mantel.

In a way, the show is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. Roseanne's point of view is what drove the show's success last season. On the other hand, in these divisive times (particularly right now), taking up any conservative viewpoint in a prime-time sitcom has its risks.

Perhaps the best way to go about it is to do it the way Tim Allen does it on “Last Man Standing,” another noteworthy revival this season that was dumped by ABC in spring 2017 but returned to Fox last month.

Allen's approach to playing the right-leaning character he plays on the show is decidedly more mild-mannered than the unabashed grenade-throwing style Roseanne Barr brought to her show last season.

Who knows? Maybe Roseanne's absence is a blessing for “The Conners.” It was reasonable to wonder if the show would have gone too far sooner or later if it had continued into the 2018-19 season as “Roseanne,” with Roseanne herself in the lead role,.

Now, perhaps the show has a better chance of gaining some staying power and sticking around for a while.