The Sneaky Roseanne Premiere Easter Egg You Might Have Missed

This post contains spoilers for ABC’s Roseanne revival premiere.

The premiere of ABC’s freshly rebooted Roseanne had a lot to do: bring Dan back to life, gather all the Conners together again, and explain how on earth Roseanne Conner—a woman who once raked a state representative over the coals for failing to promise union wages—wound up voting Republican in 2016. On top of all that, Tuesday’s premiere also managed to sneak in a few Easter eggs for longtime fans. There were jokes about Dan’s retconned death, references to hiding things with the cleaning supplies because that’s the one place no one would ever look (a line Dan once said when he hid fatty foods during his post-heart-attack days), and, perhaps most interestingly, a callback to one of the series’ few episodes that grappled with the subject of race.

Roseanne was never afraid to tackle political issues, but due to the limited role people of color got to play on the series—a fact that rankled Roseanne Barr during its original run—the show very rarely had a chance to explicitly address the subject of racism. In its seventh season, however, the sitcom came out swinging with an installment titled “White Men Can’t Kiss”—in which D.J. shies away from kissing a classmate, Geena Williams, in the school play because she is black. Roseanne scolded her son for his hesitation, as well as Dan for telling D.J. he didn’t have to kiss Geena if he didn’t want to. “Black people are just like us,” she insisted. “They’re every bit as good as us, and any people who don’t think so is just a bunch of banjo-picking, cousin-dating, barefoot embarrassments to respectable white-trash like us!”

By the end of the episode, however, Roseanne begins to doubt her own moral high ground on that point—because when Geena’s father stops by the diner one night to talk to her, she’s frightened. And she can’t tell for sure if she was scared because he was a man she didn’t know, or because he was a black man.

Given that memorable story, it’s worth noting the name of the woman that grown-up D.J. apparently married, according to the revival’s first episode: Geena.

On Tuesday night, fans found out that D.J. just returned three months ago from a tour in Syria with the U.S. Army. His wife, Geena, is still overseas, leaving D.J. to raise their daughter, who is black, on his own. Is D.J.’s wife’s name simply an Easter egg for diehard Roseanne fans, or is he actually married to the same Geena Williams he once didn’t want to kiss?

The show may or may not give an answer to that question—but in the lead-up to the revival’s premiere, Roseanne Barr talked to The Hollywood Reporter about giving Roseanne and Dan Conner a black grandchild, relating the decision directly to “White Men Can’t Kiss.”

This “was something that I always wanted to do, because of D.J. not kissing a black girl [in Season 7],” Barr explained. “I like diversity, and it’s so much a part of the working class, where it is not so much part of middle-class stuff. And I know so many people who have mixed families. My godson is African-American, and we’ve known him since he was 3. Now, he’s 23. And the conversations that my family was able to get into because of that with his parents and his siblings is just a wonderful part of my life. And if we get another season, I’d like to discuss that more.”

So whether the revival’s Geena is also D.J.’s old classmate or not, it appears the youngest Conner took Roseanne’s lesson to heart all those years ago.

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