Sara Gilbert Revived Roseanne, Then Kept the Conners Going Without Her

Sara Gilbert

Photo: Greg Hernandez from California, CA, USA / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 29, 1975 Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actress and television producer
Known for	High Fidelity, Riding in Cars with Boys, 80 for Brady
Awards	Emmy

For nine seasons, Sara Gilbert’s job on American television was to roll her eyes. Darlene Conner, the middle child of a Lanford, Illinois family that never had quite enough money, was the sarcastic one, the kid who wrote poems and refused to perform happiness for anyone. Decades later, the girl who played the family’s outsider turned out to be the one holding the family together. She pitched the revival of Roseanne, produced it, publicly condemned its star when that star’s tweets brought it down, and then spent seven more seasons proving the Conners could keep going without the woman whose name had been on the door. It cost her a bond that dated back to childhood. Now Darlene is off the air, and Gilbert is starting again in other people’s stories.

Show business was already the family business before she could read. She was born Sara Rebecca Abeles in Santa Monica, California, the daughter of Barbara Crane and Harold Abeles; her grandfather Harry Crane had co-created The Honeymooners. Her mother had earlier adopted Melissa and Jonathan Gilbert, both already familiar faces from Little House on the Prairie, and Sara took the Gilbert surname as a girl. She was barely a teenager when she was cast as Darlene.

Roseanne premiered on ABC in 1988, when Gilbert, born on January 29, 1975, was 13, and Darlene became its most quietly radical figure: a teenage girl allowed to be morose, clever and uninterested in being liked. Gilbert received two Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, in 1993 and 1994, and earned a story credit on the fourth-season episode “Don’t Make Me Over”. She also enrolled at Yale while the show was still in production; the series reworked her schedule around her studies, and she graduated with honors in 1997, the year Roseanne ended, with a degree in art and a focus on photography. During those years she dated her co-star Johnny Galecki, a relationship through which, she later said, she came to understand she was gay.

The film work that followed rarely gave her the center of the frame. She played opposite Drew Barrymore in Poison Ivy and turned up in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity and Penny Marshall’s Riding in Cars with Boys. In The Big Bang Theory she was Leslie Winkle, a brisk physicist, opposite Galecki once more; she was promoted to the main cast for the second season, then returned to recurring status.

Her most consequential move after Roseanne happened off camera. In 2010 she created The Talk for CBS, a daytime panel of women talking frankly about parenting and the news, and she publicly confirmed that she was gay in the weeks before it launched. She co-hosted for nine seasons, and in 2016 the show won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show, with Gilbert credited as creator and producer. She left in 2019, telling viewers her life had become “slightly out of balance.”

The Talk was also where the idea of going home took shape. Gilbert took the revival of Roseanne to Roseanne Barr and the original producers, and served as an executive producer when it returned to ABC in March 2018. Two months later, on May 29, Barr posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama adviser. Gilbert wrote that the comments were “abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show.” ABC canceled the series the same day.

The story has since hardened into two opposing versions, and neither is accurate. In Barr’s, told to The Washington Post in 2019, Gilbert was the betrayer: “She destroyed the show and my life with that tweet.” In the other, she is the cast’s conscience. The record is messier. The revival was her project; she had vouched for Barr, later explaining that Barr told her the reboot was her redemption and that she “chose to believe her.” She condemned the remarks, and later insisted that Barr would “always be family.” And the show that survived, The Conners, solved the problem by killing Roseanne Conner off-screen with an opioid overdose, a decision that turned a scandal into a storyline about the addiction crisis in the very kind of town the original had been written about. It worked, and it meant the series she rebuilt existed, from its first episode, as an answer to an absence.

The Conners ran for seven seasons and 112 episodes, with Darlene at its center as a single mother working her way toward stability and Gilbert as an executive producer alongside Tom Werner, her producer since the original series and later her partner in the company sara + tom. By the end, John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Lecy Goranson and Gilbert were the last of the original family. A shortened final season of six episodes began on March 26, 2025, and the series finale aired on April 23, 2025.

With the producer Ali Adler she had two children, a son in 2004 and a daughter in 2007; the couple separated in 2011. She married the songwriter Linda Perry on March 30, 2014, and their son, Rhodes, was born the following February. She filed for legal separation in December 2019. The two have stayed collaborators: in February 2026 Gilbert directed the video for Perry’s new recording of “Beautiful”, the song Perry wrote for Christina Aguilera, a short film set at a 1940s talent show starring Rhodes and Lukas Haas. Gilbert called the five-month shoot “a somewhat obsessive passion project” and said she hoped it would encourage “even a handful of people to be braver in their truth.” The track belongs to Let It Die Here, Perry’s first solo album in more than 25 years.

The acting has resumed far from Lanford. In June 2026 Netflix added Gilbert to the cast of Scooby-Doo: Origins, the live-action series from showrunners Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg, with Mckenna Grace as Daphne, shot in Atlanta and due in 2027. Her role is under wraps. In September she joined The People v. Gorilla Grodd, an HBO Max mockumentary from Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda in which the Daily Planet’s Jimmy Olsen, played by Skyler Gisondo, reopens the murder conviction of a superintelligent ape. Gilbert plays a journalist. Filming began that month on eight half-hour episodes planned for 2027.

Both put her, for the first time since she was 13, in an ensemble where nobody is named Conner and nobody expects her to keep the lights on. The next two years will show whether the industry that knew her first as the eye-rolling daughter, and then as the producer who held a broken show together, is willing to let her be a stranger again.

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Tags: actors, actresses, the big bang theory, Roseanne, Roseanne Barr, Sara Gilbert, The Conners

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