Warning: SPOILERS for The Conners season 7.

Most main characters from The Conners cast barely pop up in season 7 at all, such as Ben, Harris, and Louise.

This created an unfortunate situation for the series’ final story arc. Much of The Conners season 7 feels painfully rushed, and some characters’ finale storylines go largely unmentioned for entire episodes at a time. Even despite being the main plotline of the season, Dan’s lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company ends with a surprise check despite Dan never agreeing to a settlement amount. With such a pivotal storyline ending on such a rushed note, perhaps it’s not so surprising that certain characters were difficult to squeeze in at all.

10 Leon

The Former Lunch Box Owner

Roseanne’s frenemy, Martin Mull’s Leon Carp, appeared in 46 episodes across seven seasons of the original series. Nonetheless, his fate on the series remains uncertain. He takes over The Lunch Box toward the end of the show, but the retcon of Roseanne’s lottery season makes it less clear how long Leon remained there. Leon had unapologetically strong opinions about how the restaurant should be run, so it would be interesting to catch back up with him on The Conners to see how he feels about the changes it’s undergone from Jackie’s acquisition to the final Harris years.

Executive producers Bruce Helford and Dave Caplan actually did consider bringing the character back, but fate had other plans. After spending years without solid plans for how to incorporate the character into The Conners without Roseanne, Martin Mull ed away in 2024 mere months after the series was ordered for a final season. Had Mull still been around, there’s no telling whether his character might have been called back to check in just one last time.

9 Jerry

The Missing Conner Child

One of the biggest unanswered questions in The Conners is what happened to Dan and Roseanne’s fourth child. While Jackie’s son Andy became a natural casualty of the lottery retcon, Jerry was confirmed at the start of the revival to be alive and well on an Alaskan fishing boat. In The Conners, however, there are multiple references to Dan having only had three children. Not only was Jerry’s fate never addressed, but it’s as if he was completely written out of the canon.

Helford has previously hinted at a rift in the family, suggesting that Dan holds a grudge against Jerry for unexplained reasons. If Dan’s grudge has anything to do with the fact that Jerry is never mentioned as having attended Roseanne’s funeral, then bringing Jerry back for the Roseanne-focused final season would have given his story the perfect closure. Instead, his absence in The Conners season 7 maintains a plot hole at best or cements the permanence of a tragic fallout at worst.

8 Chuck

Dan’s Long-Time Best Friend

After appearing semi-regularly in the first few seasons, Chuck Mitchell’s absence in The Conners begins to feel increasingly notable as the show wears on. Many fans particularly took note when he failed to appear at Dan’s wedding to Louise, and he disappears from the show entirely after season 4 reveals that his wife Anne-Marie has just had a stroke. Anne-Marie never appeared on The Conners at all, but it seems like Chuck returning while Dan’s revisiting his grief in the midst of a lawsuit would have been a sensible story choice.

Ultimately, it came down to availability. James Pickens Jr. has had a long relationship with ABC, having been on The Conners when he already had a more hectic shooting schedule as Richard Webber in Grey’s Anatomy. As the years ed, it seems that asking him to pull double duty became less feasible. And with The Conners having moved from fall to spring in its final years, there’s a high probability that shooting would have fallen right in the middle of the production schedule for Grey’s.

7 Geena

Darlene & Becky’s Sister-In-Law

Although it wasn’t until the revival season that she was revealed as DJ’s wife, Geena’s character goes all the way back to 1994 when she first appeared in the Roseanne season 7 episode “White Men Can’t Kiss.” Counting The Conners, Geena has been played by a different actor in every iteration of the show since the flagship’s initial run. But that’s the least complicated part of her history.

Geena appeared on leave from Afghanistan at first, but she eventually retires from the military to stay home with DJ and their daughter Mary. It seemed they were going to bring her back after the cancellation of Maya Lynne Robinson’s other show, The Unicorn, but she was written back into an overseas deployment for reasons unknown. They likely didn’t have her cameo in the final season due to sheer lack of story ideas, but she’s not the only one in her family who stayed away for good after departing the show.

6 Mary

Harris & Mark’s Younger Cousin

Introduced in the revival season of Roseanne, Mary Conner arguably plays a larger role in The Conners than either of her parents. She appears in several episodes that don’t feature DJ or Geena at all, and neither Geena nor DJ typically gets a storyline in The Conners without it relating to Mary in some way. She also plays significantly into the early development of Mark’s character, as the two appear to share an almost sibling-like bond in the seasons during which Harris is preoccupied with teenage rebellion.

That said, it became somewhat difficult to justify keeping her on the show. When Geena left after season 3, Mary still had reason to stay in the picture. They even justified her appearing more often than DJ, since Mary was living at Dan’s while DJ was pulling extra work hours to the two of them. But once DJ was written off the show as well, Mary only stuck around for one more season. Much like Geena, it’s unclear what she might have contributed to the rushed final season besides the comfort of seeing a familiar face.

5 Ed Jr.

Dan’s Estranged Half-Brother

Ed Conner fathered Dan’s half-brother with Crystal offscreen, but Ed Jr. was born in time to show up for a few episodes of Roseanne season 4 as a tiny baby. He doesn’t resurface on The Conners until Dan finds out that his father died. The two initially argue with each other over their estrangement and differing opinions about Ed Sr., but the younger brother eventually comes to learn that their dad treated the two of them quite differently. By the end, they’re able to make amends.

Noel Fisher makes the character almost instantly likable, and it’s always fun to see another Shameless alum pop up on The Conners. Unfortunately, much like he was in Roseanne, the character was only destined to feature in a single season of The Conners. After season 2, he’s never seen again. The focus on Roseanne in season 7 would have made it harder to squeeze in a character who had no real relationship with her, but it might have been nice to see that he and Dan are still keeping in touch.

4 Crystal

Roseanne’s Ailing Former Friend

As Roseanne’s childhood friend, Crystal was a significant side character in Roseanne, with 59 appearances between the original run and the revival season. She even appears in the first season of The Conners, sharing in the family’s grief over Roseanne’s death. But aside from one more appearance in the first season, Crystal drops off the face of the earth for most of The Conners’ remaining seasons until appearing one last time in season 6.

It's the nature of her last appearance that makes Crystal’s absence from The Conners season 7 feel somewhat strange. In her last episode, it’s revealed that Dan never used money Neville gave him to pay off a ticket because he was spending the money on Crystal’s medical bills. Similar to Jackie’s mother and Chuck’s wife, this sets up a potential health scare that never feels resolved by the end of the series. It’s unclear if Dan can afford to continue helping her out after losing his lawsuit in the series finale.

3 David

Darlene’s Deadbeat Ex-Husband

David and Darlene begin dating in season 4 of Roseanne, after which Johnny Galecki continues to appear for a whopping total of 93 episodes. He’s an integral part of Darlene’s story arc, while his brother Mark (and more precisely Mark’s death) continues to inform Becky’s character well into The Conners. Sadly, David is written out in season 2 after the conclusion of his affair with Darlene. After that, he’s typically mentioned as a deadbeat who no longer maintains a relationship with his kids Mark and Harris.

The showrunners have stated that they did plan an arc for him in the final season, but their official reason for scrapping their plans was that they wanted to respect Galecki’s semi-retirement in Nashville. He’s mentioned once halfway through The Conners season 7, when Mark is running away from home, but it doesn’t sound like their relationship has improved offscreen. Needless to say, it left a sour taste for fans who hoped to see his character redeemed.

2 DJ

One Of The Original Conner Kids

Prior to Jerry’s birth and subsequent disappearance, DJ was the cherubic youngest child of the Conner family. He was the character that gave child viewers relatable stories, as well as the oddball who kept severed doll heads under his mattress. But DJ was rarely given significant storylines at all in The Conners aside from a few one-off B-plots, which paved the way for him to be written out of the series ahead of season 5.

Regardless of whether he had brought Geena and Mary along, many expected him to return at least once in the final season. Several fans were displeased by DJ’s absence in The Conners season finale, especially since he doesn’t even appear in the Roseanne flashbacks that feature at the very end of the episode. Michael Fishman hasn’t said much about his character’s absence from the final episode, but it seems as if things might have been out of his hands. Nonetheless, it’s still jarring that DJ’s name isn’t even mentioned.

1 Bev

Jackie’s Rail-Riding Mother

After being the butt of Jackie’s resentments for countless years, Beverly Harris finally made peace with her daughter in The Conners season 5 after the reveal that she used to put herself in physical harm’s way to keep Jackie safe from her husband. It would have been nice to explore their improved relationship a bit longer, but Bev only appeared in two episodes the next season before departing to ride the railways and see the world before her dementia takes over.

Jackie’s supposed to be tracking Bev on her phone after that, but she reveals in the finale’s last moments that she has no idea where Bev is anymore. This has disturbing implications, since it implies that a woman on her own with dementia no longer has access to a phone. It might seem like Estelle Parsons didn’t return to The Conners because of age, but it was also an issue of simply not having time to squeeze in her character. Regardless of the reason, Jackie’s final reveal about Bev’s fate was horribly distressing.

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