Where Are the Couch and Afghan From ‘Roseanne’ Today?

ROSEANNE, Roseanne, Laurie Metcalf, 1988-1997, — Everett Collection

When The Conners has its seventh and final season premiere tonight, one iconic original cast member won’t be present: the Conner family couch and the knit afghan flung across the back of it. Up there with the Friends couch and Archie Bunker’s chair from All in the Family, the Conner couch is one of the most famous and instantly recognizable pieces of furniture in TV history. But today, the Conner family sits on replica versions of both. So what happened to the couch and afghan after Roseanne wrapped its original run in 1997? It turns out that there’s a lot of confusion about where it ended up — even among the stars of the show.

In a 2018 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! while promoting the Roseanne reboot, Roseanne Barr and John Goodman revealed that the couch on the new show wasn’t the same as the couch used on the original show. “This is a replica, this ain’t the real one,” Barr said, while Goodman added, “The Smithsonian Institute has the real one and they wanted too much scratch for it.”

Perhaps Goodman was joking, or maybe he was just confused, but the comment led a lot of people to believe that the famed pop culture institute was being stingy with the prop, refusing to give it back to the very people who made it famous.

But in reality, the Roseanne couch never made it to the Smithsonian (whose TV memorabilia collection includes Fonzie’s leather jacket and Jeannie’s bottle from I Dream of Jeannie). Instead, when the original show wrapped, the couch was stored inside a production house. According to TMZ, it stayed there for several years, until it was purchased by someone affiliated with the show, and given to memorabilia collector James Comisar.

Comisar has an absolutely vast collection of TV memorabilia, which includes props from Cheers, The Golden Girls and M*A*S*H. And among those treasures is the Roseanne couch — and the afghan. Though multiple couch afghans were created throughout the series run, Roseanne production designer Garvin Eddy told Slate in 2015 that at a certain point in the series, “We eventually had to actually stitch it to the sofa as it became so iconic, it would certainly have been stolen.”

Everett Collection

When the Roseanne revival was first planned, Comisar talked to the production about using the original couch. However, because it was now not a prop but a highly valuable collectible, Comisar had a lot of stipulations about how it could be used. “There were so many requirements for using the actual couch,” Sara Gilbert, who plays Darlene, told the Television Academy in 2024. “It had to be insured. It had to come to set only on shoot days. You couldn’t eat or drink on it. There had to be somebody guarding it. There were all these costs and complications, and we were laughing because we use to spill stuff and eat Cheetos on that couch. It was funny to see someone being so precious about it.” The production decided to go with a replica instead.

Today, Comisar still holds the couch and afghan in his private collection, though he is planning a TV museum to eventually show his treasures to the public someday. You can check out the treasures in his collection, including the couch and afghan, here.