2. Roseanne Conner - Roseanne
Roseanne was a ground-breaking sitcom- starring Roseanne Barr and John Goodman- the show was about the blue collar Conner family. Both Barr and Goodman were a far cry from the conventional look of an American sitcom star and the show itself focused on genuine real life issues, such as abuse, teenage pregnancy and obesity. The series was funny, of course it was- but it wasnt always light hearted- things werent picture perfect. This made the revelation at the end of the show, all the more upsetting. If you thought Lost was full of shocking twists, it doesnt hold a candle to the finale of everyones favourite working class family. The end of the Ninth and final season of Roseanne revealed that the events of the show were fictional; Roseanne had made the story up as a coping mechanism. To put that into perspective, Roseanne Conner was so upset by the state of her real life that she created this world to make her feel better. How horrible must her life have been? This is a reality in which Jackie suffered from domestic violence, multiple characters had an abusive childhood and until the last season the Conners struggled with money. She had her imagination- she could have made anything up- and this what she chose. All signs point toward a rather sad and tragic life in the real world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBW_oN9a404 To top it all off, the final knife in the heart was when we learnt that Dan had died at the end of the previous season. It looked like the series was going to end in a familiar way; the family and friends were sat around the table eating take away and cracking jokes and then bam! Rosannes voice over starts and we discover the truth, Jackie is a lesbian, the Conner/Healy marriages are the other way around and Dan was killed by a heart attack. The sight of Rosanne sitting alone on her couch as the screen fades to black is devastating. If she needed to make the story up, then clearly she had a hard life and now she had to suffer through it without her husband.