Spoilers below for the Season 5 finale of The Conners, so be warned if you haven’t yet watched!
The Conners spent a lot of Season 5 exploring Darlene and Ben’s complete life reversal as a newly married couple living together, outside of Dan’s house, with Darlene’s professional life shifting around for the betterment of the family. (What show does she think she’s on?) But the season finale focused on two characters who rarely get paired up together narratively — Ames McNamara’s Mark and Jay R. Ferguson’s Ben — while addressing one of the familial elephants (not) in the room: Mark and Harris’ absentee father David Healy. While the episode didn’t get to bring Johnny Galecki back to reprise his Roseanne-originated role, it served as a fitting chapter-closing for the character, whose lingering relationship with Darlene was put to rest back in Season 2. Executive producers Bruce Helford and Dave Caplan even think it worked out better for Mark and Ben that David never popped up.
CinemaBlend spoke with both of the EPs ahead of the finale, and when I jokingly asked if all the comments made at David’s expense were secretly aimed at past guest star Johnny Galecki, they laughingly denied that being the case in any capacity, with Caplan saying, “We love Johnny!” They went on to explain that they did indeed reach out to see if the former Big Bang Theory star was available, but it doesn't sound like acting is something he's interested in jumping back into anytime soon. Here's how they put it:
- Bruce Helford: It got to be a situation where he just wasn't available, and we love him, and he loves being on the show. And we just felt we had to finally deal with that.
- Dave Caplan: Yeah, David was still kind of in the life of the show, certainly living through the kids, and we sort of had to deal with it. We made an initial approach to Johnny to see if he was available, but he's sort of not engaging with the business at the moment. But we still felt that to tell a good story about Mark and Ben, we needed the ghost of David in the show.
It might have been interesting to see how David would have reacted to Darlene and Ben's domestic life, but it probably would have just involved him sleeping with some floozie and disappointing Mark and scoring weed off Harris, amirite?
While both the episode and my convo with the Conners bosses revolved around David a lot, showrunner Bruce Helford pointed out that the episode allowed them to put a spotlight on the value that Ben brings to the family in various forms. And that certainly includes the way he quite easily took on light fatherly duties, even if Harris is probably too old for any of it to truly make up for David's absence over the years. Here's what Helford said about that:
It also it also felt like we got to the point where it was getting to be obvious that Ben's character has done all this great stuff for the family and all that, and he never really got the attention and the appreciation, and we felt this was the time to do it.
Considering how everything played out in "The Grad Finale," it's hard to think of how David would have fit into things smoothly, and so the story would have needed some huge changes in order for his presence to have an impact. When I asked if that was the case, Caplan agreed and explained:
No, I think you're absolutely right. I think it really did end up benefiting us, because we would have probably ended up playing more scenes between David and Ben. And we might have lost some time for Mark and Ben to have the kind of scenes that they ended up having. And that would have been a loss, because they were so good together and allowed us to tell such a a deep story between them.
Mark's practice graduation speech did generate a legitimate "AWWW" reaction, and I do believe Ben's follow-up request for Mark to work in a plug for the hardware store was as organically "Conners" a comment as the dude could have made. Ben is soooo part of this clan. Now if we could just get Sean Astin back in the fold as Becky's romantic foil, we could possibly see peak happiness for The Conners' core squad. Make it happen!
Following The Big Bang Theory's series finale, Johnny Galecki largely drifted away from the limelight, putting more focus on both his family life and on handling projects more behind the scenes as opposed to in front of the camera. Two of the more recent projects he'd been developing were a workplace comedy dubbed AOK and a TV adaptation of J.D. Kleinke’s novel Catching Babies, though it's been a while since any news came out about that one. But even if he never takes on another acting role again, he'll always be David Healy to a lot of us.
The Conners is ending Season 5 atop the slate of comedies at ABC, and will very likely be back for Season 6 at some point later this year, depending on what happens with the ongoing WGA writers strike. Until then, the entire past season can be streamed all over again with a Hulu subscription.
