10 TV Shows That Got Better After The Main Character's Death

6. Roseanne - Roseanne Conner

Bates Motel
ABC

It takes a special sort of ass to behave so atrociously that not only does your character get killed off, but the entire show in question is cancelled.

That was infamously the case with Roseanne Barr and her self-titled Roseanne show. With the series having been warmly received when it returned to air in 2018 for a tenth season after 22 years away, that return was short-lived when social media comments from Barr resulted in the show being axed.

Those comments were directed towards Valerie Jarrett, a former advisor of Barack Obama's. With these horrendous remarks causing ABC to cut ties with Barr and cancel the show, the one silver lining is that Roseanne lived on - and absolutely thrived - without its eponymous star.

While Roseanne itself was cancelled, the rest of the show's characters were able to continue on in spin-off effort, The Conners. Killing off the Conner clan's matriarch and revealing her to have had a long-standing secret drug problem, the series initially found Dan and the rest of the family grieving their loss, and The Conners and its four seasons to date have flourished when the series' characters moved on from Roseanne - to the point that the most recent episode (as of this writing) even had Dan remarry.

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