'Roseanne' is back

Fan's of 90s sitcom Roseanne will be happy to hear that the Conner family are back. 

Twenty years after Roseanne Barr's alter-ego and her "typical American family" - husband Dan, kids Darlene, DJ and Becky, and sister Jackie - left our screen, they're back, with the new series launching on American TV network ABC in March.

Same family. Same couch. New laughs. #Roseanne returns March 27 on ABC! pic.twitter.com/sKNs9xwlDj

— Roseanne on ABC (@RoseanneOnABC) January 9, 2018

It was the most-watched show in America in 1989/90 and topped the charts for it's original nine-season run , but the reboot has already courted some controversy. 

In August last year ABC put out a casting call for a "gender creative child". Darlene and David's son Mark will be a nonbinary character. Sara Gilbert, who plays Darlene, said in an interview with Cosmopoltian magazine that Mark likes to wear girls’ clothing but that this doesn't define him as a character: "He happens to dress that way [and] he’s an amazing, creative, brilliant kid, which you will see… I don’t want to pigeonhole him and say just because he dresses this way that’s the only thing about him."

She went on to say that Roseanne "is a show that’s always been able to represent the world". A sentiment that Roseanne herself has espoused when discussing her decision to make the Conners Trump supporters. Herself a Trump supporter, she has been reported as saying:

“I’ve always attempted to portray a realistic portrait of the American people and of working class people. And in fact, it was working class people who elected Trump, so I felt like that was very real and something that needed to be discussed especially about polarization in the family and actually hating people for the way they voted, which I feel like is not American. … There was a lot of thought in it.”

So Roseanne is back - but not quite like it was before.