ABC's pro-Trump 'Roseanne' premiere was the highest-rated sitcom episode in years

More than two decades after its original finale, a massive audience welcomed "Roseanne" back to ABC on Tuesday night. The network reported that the two-episode premiere attracted a whopping 18.2 million viewers, ABC's best results for an hour-long telecast since fall 2006.

With a 5.1 rating among adults 18-49, it was also the highest-rated sitcom episode that broadcast television has seen since CBS ratings giant "The Big Bang Theory" scored a 5.5 with its eighth season opener in September 2014. The "Roseanne" premiere also topped the 16.6 million viewers recorded for the show's original finale. CNN reported that the only scripted series to have a larger audience this season was "This Is Us," which drew 26.9 million viewers for its post-Super Bowl episode.

Roseanne Barr thanked fans via Twitter for the incredible rating: "You are all wonderful-here is to making America laugh & talk again! LOVE U"

If that sounds a little like the president's "Make America Great Again" slogan, that could be on purpose. Much of the chatter leading up to the "Roseanne" premiere surrounded the lead actress' politics, as Barr is a known Trump supporter, as is her character on the reboot. Both critics and viewers praised the show for honestly portraying a working-class family during its original run, and Barr said during the Television Critics Associations press tour that she believes "it was working-class people who elected Trump."

The reboot directly addresses the ideological divide that many American families currently face. Roseanne (Barr) and her liberal sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), have not spoken to one another since election night. The former's daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert) attempts to help her mother and aunt, who sports a pink knitted hat and "Nasty Woman" T-shirt, make amends by planning a family dinner.

Roseanne proceeds to tell her sister that Donald Trump "talked about jobs, Jackie, he said to shake things up. I know this may come as a shock to you, but we almost lost our house because of the way things are going."

Jackie retorts, "Have you looked at the news? Because now things are worse," to which Roseanne replies, "Not on the real news."

Conservatives on Twitter rallied behind the reboot, both during the premiere and the morning after.

Dan Scavino Jr., the White House's social media director, pointed out that #Roseanne was trending Tuesday night and congratulated the cast. Fox News' Sean Hannity wrote that "Proud Deplorable" Barr exceeded expectations, while British journalist Piers Morgan noted that her support for the president did not prevent the premiere from performing well.

Morgan tweeted, "A message there, methinks, for all the screaming Trump-hating liberals: not everyone in America thinks like you ..."

Matt Drudge referred to the "Roseanne" ratings as a "blowout." His link-aggregation site, Drudge Report, tweeted out a story headlined, "Can Roseanne Save America?"

Conservative radio host Ben Shapiro took a different stance, claiming that the show does not accurately depict Trump voters. He tweeted that presumed liberal-leaning critics like the reboot because it "recasts Trump voters as social Leftists who just disagree about economics" and therefore represents "a Hollywood fantasy of what Trump voters are: people who agree with Hollywood elites on values, but just disagree on economics because they're old white factory workers."

In reference to the "Roseanne" reboot, ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said during the Banff World Media Festival last summer that the network aims to produce shows that appeal to broad audiences. Barr openly spoke about her own life when the show originally aired, Dungey said, and "it's a perfect time to have that voice back to talk about the realities now."

"What the election revealed was that there's parts of our country that didn't feel heard, that they didn't have a voice," Dungey added, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "When you look at how the polling data went in the run-up to the election, it was kind of a big surprise to many people that the election turned out as it did."