Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time, No. 81: "A Stash from the Past," Roseanne

81. "A Stash from the Past," Roseanne (1993)

Welcome to the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time,” a countdown for winter 2012. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1.  A list of the programs revealed so far is here and an introduction to the project is here.

This post is late and short, and unfortunately it's not because I found a bag of pot in my closet and decided to relive my early 20s.  (If I had, this might be one 3,000-word paragraph.) I just had too many errands that couldn't be put off and too much other work, plus I made the unwise decision to watch an episode of 30 Rock that lasted an hour but felt as long as back-to-back M*A*S*H finales.

But most of you know this episode, and it's not the last entry in the Top 100 countdown that features characters who are high, drunk, or heavily medicated, so we'll get to talk more about that sitcom tradition.

Since it aired on a broadcast network, "A Stash from the Past" — in which Roseanne and Dan make use of some pot hidden and forgotten for years — is superficially an anti-drug lesson. They get high (along with Roseanne's sister Jackie, because it would be criminal not to include Laurie Metcalf in a getting-high scene), they get paranoid, and they vow to stay clean for good.

Dan: Were we really ever stupid enough to enjoy this?
Roseanne: Yes, we were, Dan. But that was a very different time. There was a war going on. Everything was a lot more fun.

Roseanne is referring to Vietnam, but there's always a war of some kind going on, we're always looking for temporary escapes, and we always suffer pangs of regret when we find them. It's true of drinking and drugs, but it can also be true of neglecting other duties to spend all your time at the gym.

Dan's "we'll never, ever do this again" is an echo of George Costanza's "I am never doing that again" in Seinfeld's "The Contest" a year before this episode, and we all know how that turned out. So enjoy this episode. Despite whatever ABC claimed when it first aired, it's not really a buzzkill.