ROSIE THE BIGOTER
ABC cancels sitcom after racist tweets
It was the surprise hit of the season — but after a racist late-night tweetstorm in which Roseanne Barr insulted Valerie Jarrett and George Soros, ABC axed the reboot of her eponymous sitcom.
Just when you thought the Barr couldn’t be set any lower . . .
ABC pulled the plug on its hit ’90s revival “Roseanne” on Tuesday, hours after star and creator Roseanne Barr went on a racist Twitter rant.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey said in a statement.
The network swung the ax swiftly after Barr’s tweets, in which she compared black former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett (inset left, below) to an ape and called billionaire George Soros (inset right, be- low) a “Nazi” who “turned in his fellow Jews.”
“Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” Barr, who played brash matriarch Roseanne Conner on the show, wrote in one tweet aimed at Jarrett, which she later deleted.
Then, after falsely claiming that Chelsea Clinton is married to Soros’ nephew, Barr responded with an “apology”pology” that in-includedded a conspiracy-racy-mon-mongeringing rant aboutout the Democratic mocratic megadonor. gadonor.
“Sorry to haveve tweeted incorrectorrect info aboutout you! Please forgive me! By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?” Barr wrote. “Soros’ goal; the overthrow of us constitutional republic by buying/ backing candidates 4 local district attorney races who will ignore US law & ffavor ‘feelings’ings’ insteadandand call everyeryone who is aalarmed by thathat ‘racist,’ ” BarBarr added in a follow-up tweetweet. In response, ABC and
Hulu yanked the reboot from their platforms, Viacom pulled all reruns from its networks and Barr’s talent agency, ICM Partners, dropped her as a client.
Barr returned to Twitter late Tuesday with a storm of tweets and retweets, in which she apologized to Jarrett.
“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans,” she wrote, adding: “It was 2 in the morning and I was ambien tweeting.”
However, Barr also retweeted a notoriously forged Stanford yearbook image of Jarrett with a message appearing to show the former adviser calling for America to become “more Islamic.”
Barr later retweeted posts noting that the quote was bogus.
The cancellation is a costly move for ABC; the network had already booked $22.7 million in ads for the second season of the revival, according to NBC News.
The wildly popular first season — a continuation of the hit sitcom (1988-97) about the working-class Conner family and starring most of the original cast, including John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf — debuted to a massive 18.2 million viewers in March and became one of the most expensive prime-time comedies for advertisers.
Barr played a staunch supporter of President Trump in the show’s revival, and the commander in chief even called the comedian to congratulate her on the premiere’s ratings.
When pitching to ad buyers just two weeks ago, ABC brought Barr up on stage to laud the show’s success — where Disney-ABC TV President Ben Sherwood quipped that Barr “really writes most of my tweets,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Dungey, the first black entertain- ment president of a major broadcast network, boasted that the reboot had been watched by “one in 10 Americans.”
After the tweets, comic Wanda Sykes announced she was quitting as consulting producer.
Sara Gilbert — who played Barr’s TV daughter, Darlene Conner, in both iterations of the show — then slammed the remarks.
“I am disappointed in her actions to say the least,” Gilbert tweeted just before the cancellation was announced.
Jarrett said she’s “fine” but wants to turn the saga into a “teaching moment” about racism that others endure every day.
“I’m worried about all the people out there who don’t have a circle of friends and followers coming to their defense,” she told MSNBC on Tuesday.
A spokesman for Soros called the tweets about him “an affront” and “insulting to the victims of the Holocaust.”
Asked about the brouhaha, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was too busy with North Korea and trade deals.
“We have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now,” she said before he spoke at a rally in Nashville, Tenn,, at which he didn’t mention Barr.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s former National Security Adviser and ex-UN Ambassador Susan Rice noted that Barr called her “a man with big swinging ape balls” back in 2013 — retweeting a screen grab of the disgraced comedian’s original tweet.