CHARACTER FLAW
ABC wanted a contrarian on mainstream television, but Roseanne Barr was never it
This was the problem all along: Having Roseanne back meant having Roseanne back.
In her relative absence from popular culture — say, in the time between when ABC’s Roseanne first ended in 1997 and when the network revived the sitcom this March — Roseanne Barr acquired or developed some opinions that a few people, sadly, may agree with, but that everyone should find appalling.
Barr’s tirades, which often drew from right-wing conspiracy theories, were no big secret. Twitter is an irresistible flame to a certain kind of celebrity moth, and Barr had trolled around many times before, under cover of free speech and her provocative brand. But it all caught up to her Tuesday after she posted several tweets, one of which, about former White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, was particularly racist. By mid-afternoon, ABC had cancelled Roseanne.
Barr’s Twitter saga didn’t end there. Early Wednesday morning, she was back at it, first blaming Ambien (“racism is not a known side effect,” the maker of the insomnia drug quickly retorted) and defensively comparing ABC’s response to her racist tweetstorm to those of other celebrities who have made controversial comments.
She reposted a tweet by Sara Gilbert, the actress who played her daughter on the show and was executive producer. Gilbert had called Barr’s initial comments “abhorrent,” saying they “do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show. I am disappointed in her actions to say the least.”
“Wow! unreal,” Barr wrote in response. Later, she moderated her stance: “no, I understand her position and why she said what she said. i forgive her. It just shocked me a bit,” she wrote.
And Barr pointed a finger at Wanda Sykes, the show’s consulting producer, for ultimately causing the show’s demise. Sykes had responded to Barr’s invective by announcing via Twitter that she wouldn’t return to the show. She wrote of Sykes, “her tweet made ABC very nervous and they cancelled the show.”
What Barr did is, unfortunately, not a bizarre occurrence in the U.S. right now. Many have experienced a return home or a reunion with old friends only to find that the conversational dynamic has shifted toward an ugly and unacceptable place. Blame Fox News, blame Infowars, blame the rise of Donald Trump — whatever mechanism of good manners used to direct traffic between people’s darkest thoughts and their big mouths has atrophied.
This is what the producers of Roseanne wanted to get at, sort of, from a sideways approach. Though it’s easy to disparage both them and ABC now for their combined failure to see this disaster building, I still take them at their word when they say they wanted to bring Barr back as the same middle-American Roseanne Conner whom we once loved, at her full volume, only to discover that she, too, voted for Trump. Why? How?
In setting up comedy premises about U.S. families, the people who make television can’t go on forever pretending that half the U.S. doesn’t exist as potential lead characters for fictional shows. Viewers were meant to be intrigued by that conservative pull on someone they loved — and by the idea that members of the Conner family (particularly Roseanne’s sister played by Laurie Metcalf ) found Roseanne’s politics to be, at best, in error, and at worst, misguided.
Yet the show failed to fully build on that premise, choosing instead to dip a topical toe in here and there, letting us see a Roseanne full of contradictions, rather than confront the beast headon: Roseanne and her husband (John Goodman) struggle to keep up their prescriptions because they’ve fallen through some crack in the health-care system; Roseanne is battling an addiction to opioids; Roseanne learns a small measure of tolerance from her new Muslim neighbours.
The ratings were high (tellingly high), yet the outcry was steady from those who would never distinguish the character from the actress who played her. And why should they? If we’ve learned anything from this, it’s that Roseanne is Roseanne is Roseanne. TV still needs a contrary, cantankerous character from which to tell the story of U.S. life and politics in 2018. But Barr was never the right person for that job.
Barr’s tirades, which often drew from right-wing conspiracy theories, were no big secret.