Aurora Starchild
Roseanne Barr has not moved on from her show being canceled 5 years ago. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, she reminisced on the incident and called ABC’s treatment toward her a “witch-burning.” Half a decade after being fired from her hit show, Roseanne, the comedian wants to get her story out.
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Roseanne Returned After 20 Years and Was ABC’s #1 Highest Ranking Show
Roseanne Barr’s show first came out in 1988. It ran for 9 seasons until 1997. After a 20-year hiatus, the show returned in March of 2018. With a jaw-dropping viewership of 28 million people, Roseanne was on top of the world.
“I was at my moms’ house at Salt Lake, and I was very happy, and my show was No. 1 after 20 years — and not just be number 1 but 28 million people watched it. So I was in happy place,” Barr told Vice.
Then it all came to a crashing halt in May.
Roseanne Barr Was Called Out for Racist Tweet Comparing a Woman to an “Ape”
Roseanne Barr says she was struggling with mental health issues at the time. She’d woken up in the middle of the night, popped an Ambien, and posted to Twitter. When she woke up, her tweet had gone viral and in a very bad way. What she wrote was construed as racist and ABC abruptly canceled her show.
Barr had referred to then-President Obama’s advisor Valerie Jarrett as if the “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” She was responding to another tweet that had accused Jarrett and the CIA of spying on French presidential candidates. And this was the second time that Roseanne had called a woman an “ape.” Previously, she referred to Susan Rice, Obama’s national security advisor in 2013, “a man with big swinging ape balls.”
“When I woke up in the morning it was all over the news and I was like, ‘Uh oh.’ And [the tweet] was characterized as racist, which made my stomach fall to my feet,” Roseanne recalled of the Jarret incident.
ABC Did Not Allow Barr to Apologize, Canceled Her Instead
Barr said that ABC called her and asked her “What possible excuse can you have for something you’ve done which is unforgivable?” When she offered to apologize publicly, the network said no.
Roseanne’s show was canceled and replaced with the entire cast except for her and renamed The Conners. But what really hurt was the way her character was killed off. The fictional Roseanne overdosed on opioids.
“Everybody knows I have struggled with mental health issues, and I was struggling at that time as well,” Barr told Vice.
Roseanne Told LA Times That She Thinks ABC Wanted Her to Really Kill Herself
Now, five years later, Roseanne is explaining what exactly was so wrong about the way she was let go. She told the LA Times that she thinks ABC was trying to send her a “message” that they “did want me to commit suicide.”
At the time that Roseanne’s tweets blew up, she profusely apologized. “I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks,” she wrote in a now-deleted tweet. She added, “I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste.”
Roseanne also told the public that she had mistaken Jarrett’s ethnicity for something it was not. “I thought she was Saudi,” she wrote. “I honestly thought she was Jewish and Persian-ignorant of me for sure, but…I did.” Another tweet read, “Yes, I mistakenly thought she was white.”
But her apologies came after she first defended herself, tweeting “Muslims r NOT a race.” Perhaps unironically, this all came just less than two weeks after Roseanne had publicly denounced the widespread anti-Semitism on social media.
The executives at ABC and Disney would have nothing to do with Roseanne after the debacle.
She Called ABC’s Treatment of Her a “Witch-Burning”
“I’ve survived. I’ve come out on the other side of it, finally. But it was a witch-burning. And it was terrifying,” she told LA Times. She added that adding insult to injury was the fact that she was denied the opportunity to make a formal apology.
“I guess you would call it the dark night of the soul. I felt like the devil himself was coming against me to try to tear me apart, to punish me for believing in God,” she said. “I’m the only person who’s lost everything, whose life’s work was stolen, stolen by people who I thought loved me.”
“They sh*t on my contribution to television and the show itself,” Barr continued. “But I forgive everybody. I started thinking that God took me out of there to save me.”
“When they killed my character off, that was a message to me, knowing that I’m mentally ill or have mental health issues, that they did want me to commit suicide,” she added. “They killed my character, and my character. And all of that was to say thank you for bringing 28 million viewers, which they never had before and will never see again. Because they can kiss my ass.”
After a Deep Depression, Roseanne Is Doing Stand-Up Comedy Again
Roseanne has almost completely disappeared from TV these days. At first, she was sleeping a lot — a whopping 17 hours a day. “I’ve got a lot of time for real life, real-life stuff. Like, just going for a walk with my mom and having an ice cream cone. Stuff like that. Waiting in lines, I’ve really been sleeping a lot, like, probably 17 hours a day,” she told Vice in October 2018.
However, Roseanne has gotten back on her feet. She’s now performing stand-up comedy in clubs. “I’m so happy that this is the most offensive in my stand-up that I’ve ever had the balls to be,” she told the LA Times. And on February 13, Fox Nation released her stand-up comedy special, Roseanne Barr: Cancel This!, and a documentary, Who Is Roseanne Barr?, on their streaming service.
“I already want to do another special,” Barr said. “I want to go further in-depth than the first one. Once I started back writing comedy, I couldn’t stop it. I wrote about four hours of material. Now I’ve got so much material it’s hard to carve down. I want to talk about what it’s like to work in the creative arts in Hollywood, how crazy it is.”
If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide please call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text TALK to 741741 or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
