As Roseanne Barr remembers it, God told her to do it.
It was Memorial Day weekend in 2018, and she was having trouble sleeping. Earlier in the day, the comedy star called Bruce Helford, the head writer of the “Roseanne” revival. Barr asked when she should plan to report back to the writers’ room of the ABC ratings juggernaut, which had been renewed for a second season.
“He said to me, ‘Oh, the writers are already back, and we would love you to come by and say hello,’” she recalls. “And when I heard it, I was like, ‘Fuck you. You’ve taken my writers’ room for my second season. Fuck you. I ain’t coming back. Fuck you.’ And then I said, ‘I’m gonna go out with the biggest bang that’s ever hit this fucking show business, even if it kills me.’”
Instead, she drifted off to sleep. But then something interrupted her Ambien- and alcohol-fueled haze.
“I was already having nightmares about never going back to that show, and God woke me up. I had my laptop there in bed, as always, and I opened it, and there was [an X post with] a picture of Valerie Jarrett next to Helena Bonham Carter in full makeup as Ari in ‘Planet of the Apes,’ and they looked like Xerox copies of each other, so I captioned it,” she says. “This was in the middle of my three-month conversations with journalists in Iran who were telling me about the loss of women’s rights there due to the Iran deal. And I was irate.”
Jarrett, who was born in Iran, had played a key role in the Obama administration’s negotiations and implementation of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. With that in mind, Barr replied to the meme with her own caption: “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” To this day, she says it was “the perfect caption” to accompany the side-by-side photos. Barr claims she didn’t know at the time that Jarrett is Black.
ABC acted swiftly. Within hours, former ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey canceled the show, pulled a scheduled rerun from that night’s lineup and suspended its awards-season campaign. But seven years later, Barr expresses no remorse about her social media outburst.
“The way I feel about it is that God told me to do what I did, and it was a nuclear bomb,” she says of the instant backlash as well as the incessant media coverage that followed. “The day of my tweet, over 2 million Americans Googled Valerie Jarrett and the Iran deal. And that was my intent. So, whatever.”
The former ratings queen isn’t shy about reflecting on the moment that led to her Hollywood exile in the new documentary “Roseanne Is America,” which launches on VOD and streaming platforms on June 10. Directed by Joel Gilbert, the film charts Barr’s origins from her earliest days in an Orthodox Jewish home in Utah to her improbable rise to single-name superstardom to her epic implosion, punctuated by Dungey calling the post “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” Disney CEO Bob Iger, who only one year prior had taken Barr to lunch and wooed her back to the network, signed off on her firing.
In Barr’s mind, there was nothing inappropriate about the tweet that derailed her comeback and outraged many in the industry.
“They were so racist that they thought my tweet said Black people look like monkeys when it was about ‘Planet of the Apes,’ which is a movie about fascism. Rod Serling himself said it’s about the Jews in Germany. It is not a movie about Black people, Bob,” she says.
The following year, Jimmy Kimmel cracked a joke about ABC’s lineup at the upfronts. “Remember last year when we got you all excited for ‘Take Two’ and ‘The Kids Are Alright’ and ‘Roseanne’ and ‘Speechless?’” Kimmel asked. “Well, canceled, canceled, racist, canceled.”
Barr says Iger put Kimmel up to it. “I don’t know if he sees anything when he looks in the mirror,” she says of the Disney chief. “And then he gets Jimmy to call me a racist. Kimmel did blackface, right?” (Barr, of course, knows the answer to her own question. “Roseanne Is America” resurfaces the Kimmel clip as well as an even more cringeworthy one featuring Joy Behar in blackface.)
Kimmel disputes Barr’s version of events. “In more than 20 years, Bob Iger has never weighed in on what jokes I do or do not make at the upfront. As always, I wish Roseanne well,” he says.
As for Iger, Barr references a story at Disney that erupted a year after she was fired. In late 2019, the Disney topper raised eyebrows at the corporate retreat when he mistakenly used the common phrase “a horse of a different color” to describe a photo of then-chief diversity officer Latondra Newton riding a white horse. (Newton later said, “Bob apologized to me afterwards and we had an honest productive conversation. I forgave him. Bob has a long irrefutable track record as a champion for inclusion and we continue to enjoy a positive relationship today. I consider him a friend.”)
“He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword,” Barr says. “I wish [Newton] would have got him fired. If he was me, I would have been fired for saying ‘white horse.’”
Disney chief communications officer Kristina Schake responded in a statement: “This is a false comparison. This was at a private retreat during a spoof awards ceremony where Bob made a remark that he quickly realized could be misconstrued. He apologized immediately and the company and Bob handled this with the utmost respect, professionalism and sensitivity.”
When Barr looks back at those who piled on and cheered at her demise, she says they are deflecting from their own racism.
“It’s Marxism 101. Accuse the other side of what you yourself are guilty of,” she explains. “Divide the people on class.”
From Barr’s perspective, the “Roseanne” revival was intended to unite people along working-class lines at a time when America was deeply rived during the first Donald Trump presidency. From the get-go, Barr — who voted for Trump — says she was met with resistance from executives.
“I came back to TV before the 2018 midterms elections, so that I could say I don’t like America being divided along racial lines, nor do I like it when they portray all Arabs as terrorists. And that was on my show my 10th season, which, you know, they fucked up because they’re such racists and classists,” she says of a plotline in which her character fears her new Muslim neighbors may be terrorists. “When I said I was going to have a Black granddaughter, they went out of their fucking minds over that. They just couldn’t have it. My idea was to have my son and his Black wife and their daughter moved in the house. And because I have Black people and Democrats in my [real-life] family, I wanted to show how we do it, which I think is the way all Americans do. You just love each other in spite of your differences. I knew that they weren’t gonna let me do it, but as on the first show, I said, No, I am gonna do it, and I’m gonna be No. 1, and then you’ll be kissing my ass or firing me.”
Instead, the network wanted to introduce an LGBTQ+ dynamic into the Conners household.
“Sara Gilbert comes in and said, ‘Well, I think the thing now is that people are more interested in their kids being gender fluid, and I think it’s Darlene that would come home with her gender fluid son who wears dresses. And I was like, ‘Oh Christ,’” she says.
Barr stood firm on the Black granddaughter storyline and “fell in love” with Jayden Rey, the actress who was cast to play the next-gen member of the clan.
“Whoopi [Goldberg] congratulated me on ‘The View.’ She loved it. But the shit they wrote for [Rey] was putrid. So fucking racist and sneering and goddamn classist. And I said, ‘You’ve got to get Black writers in here. She’s not going to say none of this shit,’” Barr says. “I knew Wanda Sykes, so I asked her to come on because she’s funny. Or was. I thought, ‘She’ll bring other young Black women writers whom I’m sure she’s mentored.’ But anyway, I guess she knew none.”
Before Sykes joined, the writer’s room was almost entirely white men, with Whitney Cummings being an exception. Barr found no kinship with the fellow female comedian.
“Whitney Cummings was forced down my throat by Tom Werner for some reason because she had made a couple of shit TV shows that flopped, so it’s the Peter principle over there. She’d sneak down to the stage and record [John] Goodman when we were just fucking off and put him with really offensive jokes on her IG account. I go, ‘Bitch, take that down.’ I did not renew her contract,” Barr says. “She called me a racist in public several times over my tweet. She’s repulsive. Now she’s going MAGA because it’s paying.” (Over the past year, Cummings has ripped into Democrats with some of her material, although she’s never identified as MAGA.) Reps for Cummings did not respond to a request for comment.
Ultimately, Barr believes that resisting the LGBTQ+ grandchild storyline made her persona non grata at ABC. One might think she would feel some connection with J.K. Rowling, who has been accused of being anti-trans. Think again.
“Well, she didn’t stick up for me, so fuck her,” Barr says. “She’s a successful artist, and they did hound her because she’s a woman and also has some common sense, but there are women who actually fought and got that law [banning puberty blockers for transgender minors in the U.K.] passed, and they’re the ones we should be celebrating. And they ain’t J.K. Rowling.”
After Barr was fired, ABC moved forward with a spinoff and killed off the eponymous star via an off-camera opioid overdose. “The Conners,” which debuted without Barr in October 2018, performed well — landing 10.5 million viewers during its premiere — but never matched the ratings promise of the “Roseanne” revival (the latter debuted with 18.4 million viewers, becoming the highest-rated comedy in nearly four years).
“I don’t feel vindicated,” Barr says of the ratings dip. “I felt pissed off that they stole my rights and killed me. They didn’t kill J.K. Rowling’s characters. It was so stupid and shortsighted, and I don’t know how they answer to their shareholders for canceling me before even one sponsor pulled out.”
Still, Barr is ready to move on and is at work on a new comedy series that she is writing with “Roseanne” and “Arli$$” alum Allan Stephan. She previously told Variety that the series will be “a cross between ‘The Roseanne Show’ and ‘The Sopranos’” and revolve around a small-town farmer in Alabama who is “saving the United States from drug gangs and China.” On the day we speak, she is about to head into production on the secret project. She has no regrets about the tweet that turned her into a Hollywood pariah. The only thing she would take back is her mea culpa at the time.
“I made the mistake of apologizing, and it only got worse after that,” she says. “Never apologize to the Left because they rub that jackboot right in your face in the mud if you apologize. All the young women bonded together to take down a woman who broke so many boundaries for women.”
