In the March 2 episode of the ABC sitcom “The Conners,” Dan Conner (played by John Goodman) and his extended family find themselves barricaded inside their home after news of a shooting at a nearby mall, and they soon learn that the perpetrator is a young neighbor of theirs.
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The family views a scene on TV that traumatizes all of them — but they each deal with their distress in different ways.
The engrossing episode, called “Triggered,” was written by Evanston native Lecy Goranson, who plays Becky on the show. It speaks of the impact on the family when they learn of the mall shooting, discover Dan owns a gun and the fear of leaving the house or having a child do something as simple as attend a birthday party.
Goranson said in an interview with Pioneer Press she was inspired to write that episode after she visited her family in Evanston on Christmas in 2019 and went to Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium with her father to see a production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
“There was a woman sitting right next to us and she said, ‘I know who you are and I know your show takes place in Lanford which is based on Elgin. I’m a high school teacher in Elgin and there’s something that you should write about and that’s gun violence. We’re experiencing a lot of that at the high school,’ ” Goranson said.
The actress decided that was an urgent message. It seemed even more significant to her when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“Gun sales have been way up in the United States,” she explained. “Gun violence has been really rampant in the Chicago area. When I came home, people would always have stories about gun violence — their kids being afraid to go on the highway because of shooting on the highway.”
She said she was told that young people were scared being at the high schools and fearful of random shootings.
“I became really focused on that topic,” Goranson said. “In Hollywood, people want to show gun violence but they don’t want to talk about the consequences of it.”
Goranson is hoping that the story she wrote will have an impact.
“I hope that people who have been traumatized by gun violence themselves or who feel afraid won’t feel alone,” she said. She wants people to “recognize that this is an epidemic in our society that is not exclusive to any part of the world, although Chicago has now been known for that. But also that we have to address this in terms of gun registration, in terms of gun ownership.”
She also noted a connection between guns and mental illness.
“Also, we are way understaffed in terms of mental health in this country,” she said.
Goranson was so serious about her desire to spread a message about gun violence via the television show that she put writing an episode about it into her contract.
“I said, ‘This is not a novelty. This is something that’s really important to me,’ ” she said.
Although Goranson gave the writers a storyline about sports for a previous episode, this was the first time she had written one.
The staff writers for the show made revisions, but Goranson said that even with the revisions the final script was close to her original.
Though this was Goranson’s first script for “The Conners,” she is not new to writing.
“I studied poetry in college and I’ve written articles before,” she said. “It’s a big passion of mine. It always has been.”
Myrna Petlicki is a freelancer.
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