Killing 
off 
a 
television 

character tends to present a 
strange paradox: A character’s 
absence can be so deeply felt 
that it manifests as an unsettling 
ghost-like 
presence. 
This 

is especially true of a show 
like 
“Roseanne”’s 
successor, 

“The Conners,” which has not 
simply lost a character, but the 
character. It’s true. Roseanne 
(Roseanne Barr, “The Roseanne 
Show”) — the dry, divisive, titular 
materfamilias who started it all 
— is dead.

“The 
Conners” 
moves 
on 

without her with grace and, 
of course, the Conner family’s 
signature brand of droll, piercing 
humor. It’s no easy feat: The 

show was tasked with explaining 
a character’s death (we learn it 
was an opioid overdose), giving 
its characters room to grieve and 
still providing humor all within 
a half-hour, Roseanne’s absence 
hanging over the episode like the 
patchwork afghan draped across 
the Conners’ living room couch.

It was a huge gamble for the 

executives at ABC, who bet that 
there might be something left for 

the show to work with following 
Barr’s abrupt firing last May. It 
paid off; turns out there’s a lot left 
for “The Conners” to work with, 
namely some sharp writing and 
excellent performances. Jackie 
(the splendid Laurie Metcalf, 
“Lady Bird”) is coping with 
her sister’s death by frantically 
re-organizing the kitchen; Dan 
(John Goodman, “Argo”), now 
without 
a 
sparring 
partner, 

is roped into helping his gay 
grandson deal with his crushes; 
and Darlene (Sara Gilbert, “The 
Talk”), now the real core of the 
show, is the one left making sure 
everyone’s OK.

Without 
Roseanne 
in 
the 

picture, Metcalf, Goodman and 
Gilbert prove themselves the 
strongest actors on television. 
It quickly becomes apparent 
that it was, in fact, Roseanne 
Barr herself who prevented last 
season’s “Roseanne” reboot from 
really being “Roseanne.”

When 
“Roseanne” 
was 

revived, ABC was quick to 
guard against Barr’s distasteful 
political views by touting the 
show’s new progressive bona 
fides. 
Roseanne 

Conner now had a 
Black 
grandchild 

and another who 
was gender non-
conforming. 
But 

it 
was 
the 
real 

Roseanne, 
and 

not the fictional 
one, who loomed 
over 
the 
reboot. 

How could anyone square those 
characters 
with 
Roseanne 

Barr’s documented racism and 
transphobia? How could a show 
about a regular family star a 
notorious Trump supporter?

Last 
year’s 
“Roseanne” 

promised frank discussions and 
good faith attempts to bridge 
the divide, but ultimately it was 
an empty promise. In the first 
episode of the season, Jackie, 
clad in a “Nasty Woman” T-shirt 

trades barbs with her Trump-
voting sister. Roseanne calls 
Jackie 
a 
snowflake. 
Jackie 

brings Russian salad to dinner. 
Roseanne 
says 
something 

about taking a knee. It wasn’t a 
discussion; it was an assemblage 
of punchlines. And it was an 
enormous disservice to the fact 
that the original “Roseanne” had 
always been intensely political, 
without calling much attention 
to it.

Old “Roseanne” was about a 

family’s improbable resilience 
in the face of life’s anxieties. 
It captured the way families 
really experience politics: not 
through 
reductive 
strawman 

arguments in the kitchen, but 

through struggling 
to pay the bills and 
dealing with the 
IRS and striking at 
the plastics factory. 
That insight was 
on full display in 
the first episode 
of “The Conners,” 
which 
saw 
the 

family 
weather 

through grief and also come to 
terms with the sobering reality 
that the bills have to be paid and 
the trivialities of life go on.

In the episode’s final scene, for 

the first time since Roseanne’s 
death, Dan sleeps in the bed he 
shared with his late wife. He 
tosses and turns, readjusts the 
covers, makes his peace and 
closes his eyes. It’s unfamiliar, 
even strange, but there’s a way 
forward.

MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN

Daily Arts Writer

WRLD ON DRUGS, the latest 

innocuous 
rap 
collaboration 

album, follows its predecessors: 
interesting in theory, fun on first 
listen but expectedly reductive.

Not since Watch the Throne 

has an album collaboration 
between two major rappers 
resulted in something other than 
the sum of its parts (but that 
album at least takes on a quality 
unique to that collaboration). 
What 
makes 
many 
of 
the 

recent 
collaboration 
albums 

bland is their inability to attain 
this quality. Often there’s the 
sense they’re not even trying, 
that these crossovers exist as 
industry moves rather than as 
organic efforts to coalesce skill 
sets and aim for a gestalt.

Last 
year’s 
collaboration 

albums between Future and 
Young Thug (SUPER SLIMEY), 
21 Savage and Offset (Without 
Warning), 
and 
Quavo 
and 

Travis Scott (HUNCHO JACK, 
Jack Huncho) all evidenced 
this. The artists in that list are 
each dynamic and boundary-
pushing in their own right, so 
it’s strange that these albums 
can be played back to back 
and sound like a relatively 
consistent 
piece 
of 
music. 

What they’re going for on these 
projects is the continuation of 
a sound, owed to Atlanta and 
centered approximately around 
the Quality Control label.

Like 
those 
projects, 

WRLD ON DRUGS aims for 
a commercial middle. Juice 
WRLD, 
of 
up-and-coming 

fame, should add some vitality 
to storied rap giant Future; 
Future’s 
reverence 
in 
the 

Atlanta rap scene should act 
as a sign of confidence to the 

upstart. To give them credit, 
this goal is ostensibly achieved. 
The very existence of this album 
achieves it.

With that box checked, the 

songs feel tacked onto this 
accomplishment. Right from 
opening track “Jet Lag,” Juice 
WRLD takes on a shiny new 
persona as a confident drug 
rapper that renders the sad-
boy aesthetic he rode to fame 
unrecognizable. Future sounds 
great 
as 
always, 
perfectly 

content to ride yet another 
victory 
lap 
around 
in 
his 

Bentley to help out the newbie. 
But Future’s best work is when 
he’s least satisfied, swallowing 
pain down with a cup of codeine 
and dredging up the past with a 
heavy snarl, and just as WRLD’s 
emo tendencies are gone here, 
so are Future’s.

The moments that work best 

are when Future and WRLD 
give each other some distance, 
allowing WRLD to feel more 
comfortable as himself. “Fine 
China” and “Realer N Realer” 
both are standouts. On the 
latter, 
WRLD 
gives 
some 

tongue-in-cheek thoughts about 
money in sing-song: “People 
love to talk about the money 
that they make / Nobody wanna 
talk about the money that they 
save / Who am I to talk about it? 
I blow money every day.” In the 
former, Future’s higher pitched 
flow plays off WRLD’s autotune 

well, and it makes for a track 
that manages to make Atlanta 
rap a little bit funny, à la Lil 
Yachty, while avoiding being, 
well, Lil Yachty.

“Astronauts,” “Red Bentley” 

and “Transformer” all find 
Future taking on the same kind 
of 
approachable, 
consistent 

flow he donned for much of 
SUPER SLIMEY, which makes 
it easier for those along for the 
ride to keep up (though Nicki 
Minaj mostly holds her own 
on “Transformer”). They’re all 
bouncy, bass-heavy tracks that 
fit easily within Future’s more 
recent discography. But it’s not 
clear why WRLD needs to be 
on any of them, and such is the 
problem with many of these 16 
tracks.

It’s strange that the two have 

decided to land at this happy 
commercial brag for so much of 
the album given Juice WRLD’s 
debut last year, Goodbye & Good 
Riddance. It’s an album all 
about pain, filled with cringe-
inducing admissions and riding 
along the dark “emo-rap” style 
recently popularized by Lil 
Uzi Vert. WRLD channels the 
energy just right of the occult 
that Uzi dances with, and it’s 
a big part of what made him 
so palatable to an audience 
increasingly interested in this 
genre 
crossover. 
It 
doesn’t 

make him look dynamic to 
wipe this persona away on this 
collaboration 
— 
nearly 
any 

rapper in 2018 can sound like 
he does here with the right 
producer. Even Usher gave it 
his best shot this week with his 
surprise Zaytoven collaboration 
A. It does the opposite, and we 
come off this album wondering 
if Juice WRLD might not 
be 
wondering, 
like 
we’re 

wondering, exactly who Juice 
WRLD is.

‘Drugs’ is just anonther 
mediocre rapper collab

MATT GALLATIN

Daily Arts Writer

ABC

WRLD ON 

DRUGS

Future & Juice 

WRLD

Epic Records

We should all be so lucky 

as to have a grandmother like 
Laurie Stode. By the beginning 
of the most recent entry in 
the 
“Halloween” 
franchise, 

the 
original 
final 
girl 
has 

grown into a badass bound 
and determined to protect her 
family from Michael Myers, the 
Shatner-masked 
serial 
killer 

who turned her life inside out 
40 years ago, by any means 
necessary. Played, as always, 
by a riveting Jamie Lee Curtis 
(“New Girl”), the same moxie 
that endeared her to audiences 
all those years ago is still there, 
but there’s something broken, 
too – something that Michael 
took from her that she never 
got back. A more focused film 
would see Curtis’s rendering of 
that brokenness and know to 
focus the movie on that, but in 
its quest to replicate as much 
about the original as possible, 
the newest “Halloween” misses 
out on the greatness right in 
front of it.

I’m not going to act like 

there’s no pleasure to watching 
Laurie and Michael go head-to-
head “Clash of the Titans” style. 
When it happens, it’s a sight to 
behold, an edge-of-your-seat, 
knockdown-dragout fight with 
crowd-pleasing moments and 
breathless tension galore. It’s 
unarguably awesome, but you 
have to sit through an hour of 
the plot spinning its wheels and 
director David Gordon Green 
(“Stronger”) running down his 
“Halloween” checklist to get 
there.

So not only is “Halloween” 

about Laurie hunting Michael 
after his escape, it’s about 
Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson 

(Andi 
Matichak, 
“Evol”) 

running around on Halloween 
night dealing with relationship 
trouble and trying not to get 
murdered. It’s about Allyson’s 
friends, who also try not to get 
murdered but don’t have the 
good fortune of being the direct 
descendant of the first movie’s 
heroine. It’s about a doctor who 
believes Michael is pure evil 
and has developed a strange 
fascination with him, and who 
is explicitly called “the new 
Loomis.” All of these have some 

direct analogue to the first film, 
and while Green’s staging of 
these homage-driven plotlines 
clearly shows his love of the 
original film, homages alone 
aren’t enough to make them 
interesting. They inevitably feel 
like distractions from the main 
event instead of stories and 
characters worth caring about 
all their own.

Even 
the 
cinematography 

cues meant to play on audience 
nostalgia fall flat. The 1978 
“Halloween” famously opens 
with a tracking shot from 
Michael’s 
point-of-view 
that 

follows him as he murders 
his sister. It’s an iconic shot 
for a number of reasons: the 
technical accomplishment of 
it, the innate cheesiness — why 
does Michael turn to watch 
the knife in the middle of the 
stabbing? — the voyeuristic 
thrill, the twist ending that 
the murderer is a six-year-old 
boy, the list goes on. The new 

film shoots much of its action 
in the same way, but here the 
tracking shots feel strangely 
perfunctory. 
They 
lack 
the 

kinetic thrill and immediacy 
offered by the best historical 
uses of the technique, and this is 
coming from someone so prone 
to praising films that include 
tracking shots that it arguably 
constitutes a form of bribery.

What’s more, when the new 

film actually goes off the beaten 
path, it can be a treat. The 
Laurie-Michael storyline should 
have been given far more focus, 
but it’s still engaging thanks 
to the catharsis of watching 
Laurie regain her agency. The 
cinematography 
apart 
from 

the tracking shots, can be 
downright gorgeous at times, 
especially in its use of wide 
shots and inventive available 
lighting. The cast is mostly 
game, with Jibrail Nantambu 
in his big screen debut playing 
what is objectively the best 
character of the year in film.

The nostalgia cues aren’t all 

bad, either, with a kickass new 
score from original director / 
composer John Carpenter, his 
son Cody Carpenter and Daniel 
Davies (“Zoo”) that plays on 
the original but adds a number 
of propulsive new layers. More 
importantly, Green makes the 
wise choice to keep Michael in 
the background for most of the 
first act, his murderous intent 
removed from the forefront of 
the frame but never from the 
forefront of Laurie’s and the 
viewer’s mind. The director’s 
understanding of what works in 
the original film can’t be denied, 
but that all too rarely carries 
over into understanding what 
works in his own film. When it’s 
good, it’s good, but far too often 
it’s a monotonous retread of the 
original’s greatest hits.

Nostalgia can’t carry the 
limp ‘Halloween’ reboot

JEREMIAH VANDERHELM

Daily Arts Writer

FILM REVIEW

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Rosanne-less ‘The Conners’ moves 
on from its former star with grace

“Halloween” 

Ann Arbor 20, 

Goodrich Quality 

16

Universal Pictures

TV REVIEW

“The 

Conners” 

Series Premiere

ABC

Tuesdays at 8

ALBUM REVIEW

EPIC RECORDS

 Wednesday, October 24, 2018 — 5A
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com