ABC Tried to Block ‘Roseanne’s ‘Satanic’ Halloween Episodes

Roseanne Barr may be a terrible person, but she made some great Halloween shows three decades ago. 

The annual Halloween-themed episodes of Roseanne quickly became a staple of the spooky season for ‘90s TV audiences. Halloween just wouldn’t have been the same without the Conners’ inventive costumes and elaborate, borderline emotionally-abusive practical jokes. 

It all began with Season Two’s “Boo!,” in which the Conners turn their home into a haunted house and Roseanne pranks Dan with some help from his business associate. 

But it turns out that we came shockingly close to getting precisely zero Roseanne Halloween episodes.

Prior to Roseanne, sitcom Halloween episodes weren’t really a thing. As we’ve mentioned before, classic sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show and The Brady Bunch occasionally featured spooky episodes, but they weren’t connected to Halloween. This would explain why Gilligan’s Island had an entire show about ghosts that aired in late March. 

As Roseanne Barr told Yahoo! TV in 2017, just a year before she was fired from the Roseanne reboot, ABC strongly opposed the idea of releasing a Halloween episode, hence why the holiday passes with no mention at all during the show’s first season. But Barr and the show’s producers pushed back.

“For a while, they refused to let us have a Halloween episode, because they said the Bible Belt doesn’t like Halloween, that they think it’s satanic, so they didn’t want it on ABC,” Barr explained. “And we’re like, ‘Are you crazy? People trick-or-treat, you know. It’s a big holiday.’ They were very kind of fundamentalist about it, but you know, that was the first dragon we slayed on the Roseanne show.”

Barr also admitted the Conner family’s escalating prank wars, which became a focal point of several Halloween episodes, originated with her co-star John Goodman. “John said the reason the Conners were poor is because they spent all their money on Halloween,” she explained. 

The network’s fears that merely showing a family celebrating Halloween would come across as “Satanic,” and thus alienate conservative Christian audiences, may seem amusing in retrospect — especially because the show’s genuinely button-pushing episodes had nothing to do with trick-or-treating — but, to be fair, the final (and worst) of the Halloween episodes did involve the Devil.

Season Nine’s “Satan, Darling” found Roseanne Conner dreaming of a Rosemary’s Baby parody in which her daughter Darlene was pregnant with the Antichrist. It also included a crossover with the characters from Absolutely Fabulous for some reason. 

And somehow this wasn’t even the nuttiest thing that happened in the ninth season of Roseanne.