Roseanne (TV Series) Death and Stuff (1989) User Reviews

Death and Stuff (#1.21)

[ComedyFan2010 · 9/10 · 4 March 2017]

Roseanne lets a tired old salesman into her kitchen and he dies. After that the family has to deal with the body while waiting for coroner to come and pronounce it dead so it can be taken away.

A very well done episode! There is nothing funny about people dying of course but they managed to make a lot of hilarious scenes showing them dealing with the situation. At the same time they managed to balance it well with the sensitivity.

The best and funniest part is when Dan needs to get something from under the body and it keeps on touching him. Pure comedy. Greatly written and performed. The scene with people coming to buy a washer in the kitchen was also great, especially with the woman giving him a massage.

Horrid and disturbing, not funny

[MagicMagicHoarderDance · 1/10 · 25 April 2023]

This entire episode is just one lowbrow joke after another about some poor man who dies in the Connors's kitchen. Unlike "All in the Family", which touched on this topic with much more sensitivity with the episode "Archie Finds A Friend", the whole running "joke" in Roseanne is that the Connors keep on having to touch the man's body and don't want to. When their daughter behaves like a creepy little rubbernecker and attempts to touch and play with the body, things just get even worse from there. The "comedy" in this episode isn't clever morbid humor about death or dying. It feels forced and uncomfortable, and while I thought the episode might at least take a moment to show a bit of empathy for the dead man, this never happens. The one bright spot in the episode is when Darlene and the investigating policeman who happens to be ethnic Greek-American, make baklava together. Other than that, we get a few bad scenes of Darlene asking when the body will "rot" and the body's hand moving due to a bump, causing it to slap Dan in the ass. When they start giving the body a "massage", it just got to be too much. The only character to even show a shred of sympathy is Becky, who points out the tragedy of a man dying in a strange house with no identity to be known by. All in all just a very gruesome, forced and weird episode.