Roseanne’s new show axed after star’s ‘abhorrent’ tweet
ONE of the biggest shows on US TV was cancelled abruptly yesterday after its star compared one of Barack Obama’s former advisers to an ape.
‘Roseanne’ was axed by ABC after Roseanne Barr tweeted about Valerie Jarrett, who is black: ‘If muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.’
Earlier Miss Barr had retweeted two articles about former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson after he was jailed for contempt of court.
Miss Barr, 65, has been a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and has often promoted conspiracy theories on social media, but her racist rant yesterday caused uproar.
Within hours of Miss Barr’s tweets, ABC issued a one line statement from its president Channing Dungey, the first black woman to hold the post. It said that Miss Barr’s comments were ‘abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values’. Bob Iger, the chairman of ABC’s parent company Disney, tweeted: ‘There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.’ Roseanne, which co-stars John Goodman, originally aired from 1988 to 1997 and won over a generation with its frank portrayal of white working class Americans.
Roseanne was the No.3 rated show in the US and was making millions of dollars for ABC. Eighteen million tuned into the debut of the sitcom’s reboot and Mr Trump called Miss Barr to congratulate her.
The new season, the show’s tenth, began in March and ran until last week by which time it got 27million viewers for its finale. Aside from the comment about Miss Jarrett, Miss Barr also outrageously tweeted that billionaire investor George Soros, 87, was a ‘nazi’ who ‘turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps’. She referred to Chelsea Clinton as ‘Chelsea Soros Clinton’ because Mr Soros is a big Democratic donor.
As the backlash began, CNN reported that advertisers were getting nervous about paying for commercials on the second season.
Miss Barr tweeted: ‘I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me – my joke was in bad taste.’
ABC had looked the other way over a tweet Miss Barr sent in 2013 in which she said that Susan Rice, President Obama’s former National Security Advisor, was ‘a man with big swinging ape balls’. ABC also apparently had no problem with Roseanne retweeting two stories about Robinson, who was jailed in a case which Right-wing activists claimed was state censorship. One of the tweets read: ‘Democracy dies in silence. The Sun doesn’t shine anymore. #FreeTommyRobinson’.
Robinson jailed – Page 10