ABC’s axe falls on Roseanne’s reboot
In 2018, the question in both comedy and social media has been: How far is too far?
Roseanne Barr, and the hundreds of people employed by ABC’s reboot of Roseanne, just found out.
Replying to a tweet about a WikiLeaks report claiming that the CIA spied on French presidential candidates during the Obama administration, Barr, almost as an aside, referred to former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett as the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes film franchise.
Within hours, Roseanne, a revival of the beloved programme that had unexpectedly become the most successful new TV series in years, had been cancelled. The announcement, from Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, was breathtaking in its force and brevity.
‘‘Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.’’
And that’s all she wrote. As outrage erupted, Barr deleted the tweet and subsequently apologised for what she called ‘‘a bad joke about (Jarrett’s) politics and her looks.’’ But the damage had been done.
Yesterday, Wanda Sykes, Barr’s longtime friend and fellow comic, had announced she would not be returning to Roseanne after acting as a consulting producer on the rebooted series. Co-star Sara Gilbert, who had been the driving force behind the show’s resurrection, quickly denounced the tweet as ‘‘abhorrent,’’ and less than an hour later, Dungey issued her statement.
‘‘There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing,’’ Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said in a tweet responding to the decision.
Though self-administered, it was a huge blow to ABC, which only two weeks ago had been touting the broad appeal of show and its star during a presentation to advertisers in New York. At the time, Roseanne looked like it might finish the season as television’s No. 1 show – a feat ABC hadn’t achieved in 24 years. (In the end, CBS’ Big Bang Theory won the top spot with an average of 18.8 million viewers to Roseanne’s 17.9 million.) – TNS